There's Steve McQueen and then there's cool.
He walks onto the screen, and then he kidnaps you.
You just want to look at Steve McQueen.
Steve had an edge.
You can't fake the way he looked.
Every man I met wanted to be him,
every woman wanted to sleep with him,
every kid wanted to be mentored by him.
He was larger than life in the public eye,
and in our family.
I think what Steve stood for was impulse.
His need for speed was so fucking genuine.
Speed was a fix that he had to have.
If he wanted to go fast, he would go fast.
If he wanted to fight, he would fight.
He would fight to the death to get his way.
Where does one begin to pick a favourite
Steve McQueen movie?
The chase sequence in Bullitt,
there's one massive slideout, whoa.
When he gets loose, every single time
I'm like...
Those eyes, he could give you that stare,
and you knew he meant business.
You work your side of the street, and I'll work mine.
He lived life to the fullest, man.
Steve McQueen was the coolest of the cool.
With searing performances in blockbusters
like the Magnificent Seven and Bullitt,
his love for fast cars, beautiful women,
and life on the edge,
He was one of the hottest cultural icons
of the 20th century.
My dad has gotten the nickname since he's
passed, "The king of cool".
But he, you know, even when he was alive
he always had that, everybody'd say
he's just so fucking cool, he's cool, he's cool.
There's Steve McQueen and then there's cool.
He predated cool.
Steve McQueen is somebody
too cool to be bothered with the things
that bothered the rest of us 24 hours a day.
Oh, you bastard.
It's one thing to have that confidence, though,
it doesn't hurt to look like Steve McQueen.
It doesn't hurt to have those eyes.
Those eyes were just, they're just piercing.
When he's in a scene, even if he's not talking
there was so much being said.
Everything that Steve McQueen did,
he looked cool doing it.
Driving that dune buggy in The Thomas Crown Affair,
of course, the Mustang chase scene in Bullitt.
But my favourite images of Steve McQueen
are of him holding a beer next to his pick-up truck,
with the beard and the cowboy hat.
Whatever look Steve McQueen had, it looked cool.
It's that something, you know?
He was a man unlike any other, and he owned it.
He's the guy's guy, he embodied all the things that,
man, I wanna be able to jump a motorcycle
and race cars, and get the girl, you know.
He loved women.
He loved the danger of life, he lived on the edge.
He came out of a rough hewn kind of existence.
I like a guy to have, you know,
maybe a little dirt under his fingernails,
but to be able to put a suit on,
and have that sophistication, it just added
a whole another level.
Great looks, charisma, masculinity,
vulnerability, menace.
He had the fucking lot.
You know, he had all these numbers coming in.
In Hollywood, there are actors who play the part
and actors that live it.
This is the story of one man who pushed the boundaries,
broke the rules, and drove through life on his own terms.
But for McQueen, the road to success
was not an easy one.
Steve McQueen really had all the odds
stacked against him.
He had two alcoholic parents, he was born
six months after the great depression,
he was on the fast track to jail,
and he lived pretty much a homeless existence.
He had a very crappy existence as a kid, you know?
Yeah, Steve came up from nothing,
he was in a boy's home, Boy's Republic.
From the way I hear it, it was because
he was doing delinquent shit, you know.
He's stealing, and I don't think he was stealing
just to be one of the guys, I think
if anything, he was to feed himself.
He escaped from the Boy's Republic, and they
caught him, and of course they punished him.
And he escaped another time, and then they brought
him back and said, "Ok, if you don't settle down."
he said, "We're gonna have to really be severe with you."
If you screw up after Boy's Republic,
you go to prison, you go to jail, you go to the big house.
As Steve learned to kerb his wild side,
his estranged mother Julia invited him
to live with her in New York City.
She sent him a little money, five dollars.
So, with five dollars on him,
the Boy's Republic gave him a pair of jeans and a shirt.
It's hard for me to go through...
I don't know why, but every time I think about it
I really see this kid, at 16,
travelling cross-country with only five dollars in his...
With only five dollars on him, going to New York
to meet up with his mother, you know?
And then when he got off the bus,
he smelt liquor on her breath,
and she had started to drink at that point in time.
My dad's mother, Julia, my dad
never brought her up that I can remember.
I know there was a tremendous amount
of anger, as expected.
But then my mum tells me that the day she died
he broke down, so you try and figure that one out.
It's a heavy dynamic.
You did come from a broken family,
and you went through probably, what,
50 odd jobs?
Oh, I went through an awful lot, dishwashing,
truck driving, post office, everything.
At 17, he joined the Marine Corps.
He was assigned to the motor pool,
and then he became a tank driver.
He was one happy boy over there,
because suddenly all this machinery was right
in front of him and he was fascinated by it all.
The Boy's Republic and the Marine Corps
really were his true homes.
He'd found an anchor in his life, you know,
for the first time.
When he was discharged at 20,
he was looking around to see what to do.
With the GI Bill, he decided to take up acting,
like a lot of people did, because of the girls.
Got his way, man, because he ended up being
one of the best actors ever.
It may well have been the girls, but in the 50's,
if you wanted to act, you'd chase the dream to New York City
like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe,
and thousands of actors that never had a chance.
I know that when I was studying in New York,
I knew that I couldn't afford to fail,
because it was the only thing that I knew how to do
and that I didn't know any other trade,
but then I really, I do enjoy acting.
I think it's a great craft, you know?
I mean, it's a marvellous kind of feeling, you know.
Steve at that time was,
he was real skinny, and he wore some kind of
an old black raincoat all the time,
and he spent all of his time hustling people
and trying to get work, and he would do
anything, he said, anything for a part.
When you were accepted in this famed school
it was quite a turning point of your career
and certainly a thrill for you, wasn't it?
Oh boy, I was living on a cold water flat
on the Third Avenue El, and you know, working
all night and going to school all day.
And at the time, I guess it doesn't seem much now
but at the time, they were accepting something like
four out of 2,000 people a year, you know,
to be accepted in the studio and it was free,
and you could go three days a week.
I went to a drama school in London,
it is a great education to have for any actor,
but at the end of the day, you can have all
the instincts and all the intellect,
and be able to talk 'til the cows come home about it,
but if you can't do it, then you're dead in the water.
And acting is about doing.
I'm an intuitive actor, I mean, I couldn't sit
and talk about acting and say, this is what I do,
because I don't really know.
- But you studied it for years. - Yeah.
In some of the finest academies.
- Yeah... - Studied yourself?
But it's an intuitive.
Yeah I did, it's self-therapy, that's what it is.
Steve was fiercely competitive.
I mean really, fiercely competitive.
If you were blonde and blue-eyed and good looking,
you were just like a rattlesnake to Steve.
I'll kill you right now.
He knew he just had to somehow get past you
to achieve his goal.
I got my chance simply because
I can run harder than some other guy.
But if I want a chance now, I've got to grab it.
He believed, in some weird way,
that I would be in the way from him achieving what
he really wanted to achieve which was desperate.
He actually would say things like,
I'll just run over the son of a bitch,
he gets in my way, I'll just drive over him.
I didn't come here to be a petty thief.
But that's what New York was like,
it was desperate, it was a desperate time.
Despite some modest success, McQueen
was getting nowhere fast.
Until he met a rising Broadway star
everyone was talking about.
I was a Broadway baby, my life was
all about dancing.
I had just come out of Carnegie Hall,
I had been rehearsing for a show called "Pyjama Game".
There he was, with a dog, a big dog.
He had a German Shepherd with him.
He said, "Hi, you're pretty."
And I said, I didn't know what to say,
I just saw those blue eyes, you know?
And I said well, you're pretty too.
I don't know, I suppose that opposites
attract, but I guess it was never a thing of
falling in love with a girl at first sight,
I guess that was it because I sure had
to chase her for a long time.
He picked me up on his motorcycle one night
and that was it.
Four months later, we were married.
And everybody kept saying, you should marry him.
At the time, I didn't have too much
collateral going for myself, and I think
her mother was, and rightfully so,
I think she was a bit, she thought I was a little crazy.
He was a starving actor and I was really
working hard, you know.
I was never unemployed at that time.
He just kept trying, he just felt that
he would make it eventually.
He showed hunger and determination,
and as a result he was signed by Neile's manager.
Neile would always say, "Well, this is what I see in you."
"If you'd give a little of that in your performance,"
"then you'll be recognised."
And that's where you really see the first
of the McQueen persona starting to emerge.
There's that thing that he has which is
the passion, you've gotta have that
to just keep going, because you're just gonna get,
you know, knocked down, and then...
I mean, the sea you swim in is rejection.
At 27, McQueen landed his first leading role
by convincing the producers he could play a teenager.
Doctor Hallen is dead, and he was killed
by some sort of a monster.
If you love movies, you can't hate "The Blob".
You can pick it apart, and find a thousand things
wrong with it, but if you love
classic movies, you can't hate it.
You get a lot of McQueen, of the McQueen
that we would then later identify with so easily.
First of all, he's a little bit of an outsider.
And he's definitely cooler than the other kids,
and he doesn't back down from them at all.
I saw this thing kill Dr. Hallen tonight.
We get McQueen the driver in that movie, too,
the confident recklessness
that would be associated with him for so many years.
$3,000 was McQueen's payday
for what was imagined to be just
another low-budget horror film.
Now of course, The Blob, with its sequels,
and its cult status, became a rather
significant film historically.
But of course one of the reasons why it's
a significant film historically is because
it stars Steven McQueen.
Without McQueen I'm not sure The Blob takes on that stature.
And it's great to see that it stars Steven McQueen,
which seems like a totally different guy.
The king of cool can't be named Steven,
first of all, the king of cool is named Steve.
My dad would always joke about it.
Basically say, "That's my best stuff."
I think at one point he actually tried to
buy the print back, you know.
There was a silver lining in The Blob
for McQueen in that producer Dick Powell actually
requested a screener of the film, and he was
impressed with McQueen's performance.
That led to Wanted: Dead or Alive.
Bounty hunter, ain't ya?
That's right.
A rugged bounty hunter who played
by his own rules, was pure McQueen.
And with this big break, he was determined
to make his mark.
He wanted to make this character his own.
The Western hero would get in a punch-out
with four or five guys, and he would win the fight,
and McQueen would look at the script and go,
no, no, no, that's not real.
What you do is, you sneak up on each guy,
one person at a time, and you beat the crap out of them.
He brought a lot of real life experiences
to this character.
Randall, do you hear me.
Hold it, don't try it, you're not that fast.
After years of struggling, Steve
suddenly become a big hit, became a household
name in Wanted: Dead or Alive.
We've always loved the Western heroes.
The shows that worked, that had a star,
and guy like McQueen, obviously he popped.
Hollywood producers who were willing to watch television,
of which there, I don't know how many there were
since they were deathly afraid of it in those days,
if they went home at night and watched
Wanted: Dead or Alive, they obviously saw
a guy who could succeed as a movie star,
as long as they were willing to get past the notion
that no TV star could ever be a movie star.
You know, he always knew that he would make it.
It was Steve's destiny to make it big,
because he was such an original.
Then, McQueen, he makes the Magnificent Seven
with John Sturges.
And it's got Yul Brynner in it,
he's an Oscar winner, and he's obviously the star,
and within a couple of scenes, you see
scenes being stolen from Brynner,
who's terrific in the film, but
McQueen, mostly by not saying anything,
is sort of stealing Brynner's thunder.
The shaking of the shotgun shells,
you'll see him fiddling with a hat, anything
to usurp or take away attention from Yul Brynner.
Litterbug.
You have two people on a screen,
and you want to watch this person
more than you want to watch that person.
You just want to look at Steve McQueen.
He walks onto the screen and he kidnaps you.
Steve McQueen's characters all had
very defining qualities.
He was the guy that was tough,
but without putting it in your face.
He was the guy that you don't wanna mess with,
but you look up to him.
And as an actor, yeah, those are
the parts you wanna play, and those are,
that's who you want to be.
You watch a movie and there's always that
character that you wanna be, and he
found a way to always be that guy.
Brynner was very much the king.
He was living in a lovely home,
we were all living in a hotel we all stayed in,
we all had connecting doors.
So knock on my door, it's Steve.
He said, "Hey, did you see that gun Brynner's got?"
"That silver gun, catches the sunlight?"
"Everybody'd be looking at Brynner,"
"nobody'd be looking at me."
Well, he didn't like that at all.
He was very competitive.
He was watching Yul Brynner like he was
lining up somebody to shoot.
McQueen's street smarts really
came into play with this movie.
He was one of the first people, if not the first,
to make that transition from TV to being a movie star.
And all of a sudden, then, a guy, who many
had predicted stardom for, achieved it.
With McQueen's new status at the box office,
he realised that to stay on top
would mean his films had to be on his terms.
Steve was looking at The Great Escape as
he was the star of that movie, but
he felt that what was written on the page
wasn't necessarily going to take him there.
He didn't just want to be part of this ensemble,
he wanted that separation so that people
would say, ok, this is the guy that we want to follow.
McQueen knew he had to do whatever it took
to get that part to where it needed to be.
During production McQueen quits, he walks out.
United artists is panicking, this is a big movie,
a big deal production, they got a big time
director in John Sturges, they got a big cast,
and their biggest star is all of a sudden not cooperating.
There's a great deal of compromise involved
in movies, I suppose, and I get a bit
undone when people try to use me
or there's compromises or injustice,
and I fly off the handle.
Right is right, and you know what that is,
and being willing to sacrifice if it comes down to that,
in his case walking off set, pretty big statement.
When he believed in a direction that
he wanted to go, he would fight for it.
He would fight to the death to get his way,
and if anybody got in the way of his vision,
get ready.
McQueen said, I want you to assign a writer to me
so that I can put my signatures on the film.
McQueen gets the rewrites, his character
gets enhanced significantly, and oddly
the writer who comes in, Ivan Moffat who had been
Oscar nominated, he is responsible for so many
of the things in the movie which we now
associate with McQueen, which really are the things
in the movie we associate with the movie.
In the cooler, with the baseball glove and the great sound.
Da-doom, tch.
I mean, when I sit at home and I bounce a tennis ball
off the wall without a baseball glove and catch it,
you think about that, of course.
You don't just think about it, I'm imitating it.
For him to stay true to himself,
no matter what that meant, whether he
had to walk off set or ask something to be
rewritten, or change his dialogue,
that takes a lot of balls.
Hills, isn't it?
Captain Hilts.
John Sturges written in the script that when
I make my escape, I steal a German motorcycle,
and then we start our escape over the Alps into Switzerland.
My dad would ride motorcycles
even when he was working, you know,
he'd sneak off and go to tracks.
He incorporated his love for cars
and motorcycles in his films.
To go in when you're, when a machine
can fall apart, aren't you scared?
No, no, doesn't scare me.
Steve McQueen just took a jump
on a dirt motorcycle, and this
is what he calls "scrambling".
Whether Steve McQueen was doing the action
all of the stunts or not, the fact that
he was so obviously capable, it made it really easy
to interchange between an actor and a stunt guy.
I can recognise when it's him on a motorbike.
There's something kind of bouncy about him,
like he's sort of always got his,
his feet, using his legs as suspension.
He loved Bud Ekins, they were very, very close.
He trusted him.
Bud went with him and did the pictures
as a stunt double for him.
Bud Ekins came into town because Steve had
wanted him, because he wanted to do some motorcycle stuff.
I watched them build this stunt.
Every day, he kept jumping,
and the thing got bigger and wider.
One day after conferring with Steve, Sturges asked Bud,
"Can you jump five feet over that fence?"
And Bud said, "I think I can do it better."
Bud jumped something like 14 feet
and I don't know how wide.
Steve did, but, insurance wouldn't let him do it on film.
Because if something had happened, he'd fallen,
that film would have shut down
and it would have cost them a fortune.
Wasn't it awhile ago that the studios prohibited you
doing any racing while you were actually in production?
Oh, sshh.
When McQueen's character, on film made that jump
audiences jumped in the air and cheered for him.
Variety, 1962.
"There are some exceptional performances."
"The most provocative single impression"
"is made by Steve McQueen."
After making The Great Escape, he is
if not the biggest star in the world,
he is in the top two or three.
Now a bona fide movie star, McQueen set his
sights on Hollywood legend Edward G Robinson.
I went up to his house, there was a pool table.
And he said, "Do you play?"
I got lucky and sank a few balls,
there was a pause.
He says, "Tell me about Edward G. Robinson."
I could tell that he was worried about Edward G.
I said, he's a good actor.
I think you should be careful with Edward G.
Because right away I was trying,
I was trying to set him up so he was a little insecure.
That scene, where he just looks at him,
and you feel the tension right away.
I can get the money.
I know you can.
Robinson, he used to say, "I'm gonna gut him."
Ok, let's see it.
You're good, kid, but as long as
I'm around, you're second best.
You might as well learn to live with it.
There was something impish about him.
I used to have to talk to the other actors,
because they were always complaining.
He'd be looking down, he'd be looking off.
And then, when it came to his line,
he'd look right just off the edge of the camera, bing.
He had all these little tricks,
and actors used to hate that.
"Why doesn't he look into my eyes,"
"he's not giving me anything."
and I said because he doesn't want to.
He always played with such mystery,
he had such a reserve to him,
and he had this emotional underpinning,
keeping you, the viewer, involved with what he was doing.
As an actor, he was not that secure.
He liked an older director.
I said, "You're looking for a father image."
"I can't be your father, but I can be your older brother,"
"the one who went to college."
"You can always count on me,"
"I'll look out for you."
And, I think he believed that, and that's
why we had a great relationship.
Sometimes you bump into a director
that really will challenge you,
or you're opposite an actor who is just
so electric, so smart, they raise your game.
The digital fix, 2005.
"Steve McQueen is effortlessly watchable as the kid,"
providing a masterclass in the power
"of natural screen presence."
All that stuff that was moving around
inside of him all of his life,
came across on the screen.
That madness, that chilling quality that he had.
It came from his childhood.
It came from the life he lived as a young man.
It came from the insecurity of life,
the pain of that insecurity.
What do you remember most about your childhood?
You didn't go very far, you didn't dig school, I know that.
Well, I liked it all right, but,
I had to get out and earn a little bread,
I had to get out an earn a living.
What do I remember most about my childhood?
Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, if you wanna know.
That's great, that's great.
We went back to the Boy's Republic
for the first time, and he was all dressed up
in his Brioni suit.
I said, why are you getting so dressed up?
He said, "I want those boys to see me now",
"today, so that maybe one of them will look"
"at me and say, I wanna be him someday."
On set he would sometimes have these
diva-ish demands, like hundreds of razor blades,
and hundreds of t-shirts, and hundreds of blue jeans.
He would donate all of that to the Boy's Republic.
Steve had a huge heart, and he wanted to give.
He came from dirt poor with nothing.
And he rose to be the number one star.
I mean, talk about a success story.
He opened up so many minds.
If he could do it, anybody could do it.
He was larger than life in the public eye,
and in our family.
I mean, can you imagine coming from nothing
and all of the sudden he's living in Oakmont,
the compound at Oakmont in Brentwood.
I mean, he had a good time.
He loved life, man, he enjoyed it.
Life was good.
And McQueen's two children, Chad and Terry,
meant everything to him.
Terry really was the apple of his eye.
He saw the world through the eyes of a child, you know?
So he always related well to kids.
Terry was the Powderpuff champion at 14.
They were riding bikes at Indian dunes.
And of course, Chad,
being the boy who idolised his dad,
was just, did everything that Steve did.
They had this big party, best in Hollywood
young people are there.
I saw Steve out on the veranda
looking out toward the ocean.
I said to him, when you were back there
in Greenwich Village, with Niele on the back
of your bike, did you ever think you'd wind up like this?
It was a long pause, and he said,
"What makes you think I'm gonna wind up like this?"
It was a terrifying moment, he didn't even look
at me, he just said it out into the air.
Something was hovering over him all the time
that made him aware that this was transitory,
this life that he was living.
He had all these stories about his childhood,
and he was a bad kid, I mean,
because he was looking for a father.
And I bring it all down to that.
Steve was really looking for his father.
Once my dad became successful,
he wanted to find his dad.
He was trying to hunt him down.
Steve was like a detective when he wanted
to find out something he would be
tenacious over the whole thing.
Eventually, we found the trail.
We met up with his girlfriend.
And he had died two weeks before.
He used to watch Wanted: Dead or Alive
and goes, "I think that could be my son."
I want to talk to you.
And I haven't got much time.
But he had had a heart attack.
It was sad.
You never know with a Hollywood star
whether you're seeing the real person.
Everyone said that John Wayne was a great hero,
but the reality is that John Wayne played great heroes.
With McQueen, you definitely got the idea that
you were seeing an authentic person.
Filmed exclusively in Taiwan,
McQueen would star in an epic wartime saga
that garnered him his first and only
academy award nomination.
Welcome aboard The Sand Pebbles.
That's what we call it, we're sand pebbles.
Why don't I show you your bunk...
I wanna look at the engine first.
If you look at his character Jake in The Sand Pebbles,
it was all about that engine room.
Hello, engine.
I'm Jake Holman.
That's when he came alive.
It was just so much Steve.
It was adding those little things that just
put his touch on it.
If you let me run an engine room the way
I'm supposed to, sir, I can give you up to 12 knots.
The Sand Pebbles represents his military experience.
His films were biographical.
They all represented a certain part of his life.
So I guess I started swinging.
So anyhow, the judge says you've got three choices.
Army, Navy, Reform School.
McQueen throughout his career had this ability
which is the mark of a really talented actor, to convey
these sort of powerful emotions
without saying a word.
He's instinctive.
If you say to a director with balls,
and you say, I'm saying all this, with a look.
That's awesome, that's instinct.
That's someone sort of doing their work.
You can hone intuition,
you can sharpen intuition,
work on intuition,
but you have to have the bloody thing to start with.
If you look at his scripts, he would
cross out the dialogue.
He said, everybody else fill in the story and when there's
something really important to say, I'll say it.
He knew what his strengths were.
The art of it is to make it look effortless.
Steve McQueen made acting look as easy as breathing.
New York Daily News, 1966.
"McQueen gives the most important and best
characterisation of his film career."
When he got the academy award nomination for The Sand Pebbles
my dad was, I don't think really
gave a shit about stuff like that.
I do believe one thing, though, that
I believe I want to lead the type of life
that I want to lead, in other words,
my private life is my own, and I'll
fight to have that.
Whatever part of the world my dad was working in,
he'd make sure we went with him.
So The Sand Pebbles, we thought it was gonna be
a short shoot, we were there for nine months.
As a son, it was so cool to know that
ok, my dad's going away, but we're going with him.
I'm not gonna be away from my dad.
Or my mum or my sister, you know?
He's criticised for certain things,
but a father was never one of them.
He was, they were his kids, and there was no,
there was no getting around that.
He dug having us around.
I know a lot of that's since he had no family at all,
but that being said, being a 6 or 7 year old boy
and moving to Taiwan was pretty mind-blowing.
It's a lot of culture shock.
The fact that Steve travelled with his family, I mean,
I love that, that he was a good dad.
That got me.
I said, have you read that script
that I put up on your desk?
He said, "Well, I scanned through it, it's ok."
I said, well it's too bad Norman doesn't want you for that.
He said, "What do you mean?"
I said, well, Norman doesn't want you for that thing.
He couldn't believe what I was saying.
I said, well, everybody else has the script, too.
There's Sean Connery, Rock Hudson, Robert Wagner,
Paul Newman, everybody had the script.
So he said, "Well, excuse me."
He got up and went upstairs and called Norman.
I said to him right away, I said,
you know, you've never played a part like this.
There's no motorcycles, there's no gun play.
I've never seen you wear a tie.
How can you play Thomas Crown?
By the time the conversation ended, he got the part.
Doing The Thomas Crown Affair
was a departure and it was a challenge.
It was about excess, it was about the theatricality
and the flamboyance of excess, it was about money,
and it was about luxury, and it was about sex.
He was a little worried about the casting.
He wanted me to meet a couple of other women
that he felt would be right for the Faye Dunaway part.
I said, listen, I saw her, I think
she can be very, very sexy.
I think it's all in here, all in your eyes.
The chess scene, for instance.
It's not really about chess, it's about power.
It's about control.
Who's got the control?
She looks at the chessboard and looks at you,
and you look at her looking, and all you say is,
do you play?
Try me.
And that's it.
And we're gonna play chess for the next
three or four minutes of screen-time.
She's going to win.
And when she says checkmate,
let's play something else.
And that's going to be the longest kiss
in screen history.
He liked that, he liked the challenge.
Who plays chess like that?
The love scene he has,
the longest kiss ever.
It's amazing.
I told her, I said you'd be making
a big mistake if you make love to Steve McQueen,
because a lot of women fall in love with him.
And he's gonna try and seduce you,
and he can be very charming.
I think Faye stood her ground.
It turned out to be a wonderful chemistry
between the two of them, and I think part of that
was because he wanted her and she wouldn't give in.
Who wears a British cop tailored three piece suit
better than Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair?
I mean, no one looks as good in those clothes.
He's sophisticated, and he's...
Hello.
Charming.
And there's a bit of street underneath.
Any minute now he could sort of say,
don't fuck with me.
If I'm a guy with a lot of money,
and I can have anything, why doesn't he
drive something wild on that beach?
Have you ever heard of a dune buggy?
I wonder what Faye's thinking,
because Steve, this is what he does, he's comfortable.
She must have been terrified.
He loved this dune buggy,
because this was his idea.
One sentence.
Speed, machinery, or his balls.
Truly, I can only say that.
With success and money, McQueen
collected cars, and only the best.
Shelby Cobra, Jaguar XKSS, Porsches, Lotus,
they all found a home in McQueen's garage.
I would talk to random people and they would say,
I was younger, I was driving, and this car
just raced past me, and I looked in the window
it was Steve McQueen.
Money meant toys, lots of trucks,
lots of motorcycles, some planes.
His tastes were all over the place,
but if you look at what he was buying and what he kept
30 years later, they're significant pieces of machinery.
Steve definitely seemed passionate about his cars.
He had an eclectic collection from the Mini to the XKSS
to obviously the Porsches and the Ferraris, he seemed
to get the most out of whatever it was he was driving.
The '58 Porsche Speedster, that was the first
new car he bought, and the first car
in which he won his first race at SCCA.
He sold it.
I paid $1500 for it.
The gentleman that owned it said, "Oh by the way",
"the original owner was Steve McQueen."
It was like, well that's cool.
The Porsche dealer in Hollywood said
he knew this guy Bruce that had my dad's old Speedster.
I said that's impossible, no way.
Few weeks later I get a call from Steve.
I understand you have my car, but you couldn't have my car.
My dad went back where he had the roll bar in place.
He pulled back the tonneau cover,
and it had this German weave carpet.
He literally just, it's glued down,
he just peeled it back.
I'm thinking, that's kind of presumptuous.
And there was the mounting for the roll bar.
He says, "Oh my God," and he was just all over the car.
You could tell he was going through
a real connection with this car.
He says, "You've gotta sell me this car."
I say I don't wanna sell this car,
I enjoy the car, I've had it a long time.
My dad can be persuasive to say the least.
Three months, four months later, that car's at our house.
I think if they brought it to market now,
I wouldn't be able to afford it.
It would be a seven figure number.
Not single million, but millions.
At the Petersen Automotive Museum,
we have his XKSS, which is an extremely rare car.
A car like that today, without the McQueen
provenance, would be in the neighbourhood
of four or five million dollars.
If that car became available today,
I'm guessing it would be well over 10 million dollars.
When the D-Type Jaguar became uncompetitive
they turned the last 16 into road cars, the XKSS.
He loved that thing, it was really
a race car for the street.
My dad used to flog that thing
when he decided to pedal down, get ready for a ride.
Once you're behind the wheel, it's freedom.
I'm not a doctor, but I always imagine that
somebody who came from McQueen's background
was always trying to get away as quickly as possible
from wherever he was, from that situation.
So the idea of explosive speed,
I can see how that would appeal to somebody.
That is armchair psychology at its basic levels,
but it seems to make sense for a guy who,
according to everybody who knew him,
from the earliest age, lived to drive fast,
to go fast.
The need for speed is in your DNA.
It's not like you can train somebody
to go fast or brave speed.
It's part of your genetic make-up,
it's a mutant gene that just is very hard to satisfy.
No matter how fast you go, you need to go faster.
And McQueen would go faster.
He competed at the highest level, bankrolling
his own racing team, solo racing,
entering Santa Barbara, Del Mar,
and Sebring's 12 hour around-the-clock endurance race.
Steve was a very talented driver,
and very gutsy, and fearless.
That's a terrific combination.
Every motorhead and every racer respected Steve
for his genuine bona fide driving talents.
It was always about testing himself.
He always wanted to measure himself against the best.
Motor Trend magazine, 2004.
"Steve McQueen's legend lives large."
"His love of all things mechanical"
"was legitimate and genuine."
Every one of my dad's cars
they've all got their little stories.
The funny thing about that car,
I get more thumbs-up in that one than anything.
People know that car from Bullitt.
When anyone ever does a top 10 list of car chases
on screen, it's always Bullitt as number one.
The interesting thing is that in the script
it just says two words, and that is, "car chase."
And in McQueen's head, he knew exactly
what he was going to go for.
To have that kind of control,
it's like a kid in a candy store.
He gets write his own car chase?
He got to do what he loved and do it
the way he wanted to do it.
The genius of my dad was when he knew
he was gonna do Bullitt, he had to figure out
a great car that a detective could afford.
They picked the Mustang, and then he got some of the best
engineers to work on the car, get it ready for jumping.
The chase sequence in Bullitt.
Every time I watch it.
There's one massive slideout, whoa,
when he gets loose.
Every single time, I'm like...
We have Bill Hickman, who is probably
one of the finest stunt drivers in the world today,
and myself is probably the worst.
We felt that we should start off working
in close harmony at a racetrack,
so that Bill Hickman and myself would be used
to working close to each other at high speed.
So we went out to Cotati raceway up above San Francisco
and worked at high speeds at well over the ton mark.
I was always a moper guy initially.
So of course these two cars in that famous chase scene.
There is the Mustang and there is the moper.
Steve drives the Mustang, the '68 fastback.
It's one of those things you can watch
over and over and over again.
It's just pretty amazing how that was done.
We were involved in approximately
22 to 30 square blocks,
so we had close to 50 people
stationed with walkie talkies that would be able
to give us clearances when to start,
and know that everything would be taken care of
as far as people accidentally walking into the scene.
I've driven an original '68,
and they're big, they're heavy, the big motor
in the front, no brakes to speak of.
I think they had two discs in the front and a rear drum.
They got up to 124 miles an hour.
Cameraman actually leaning out the car, with his body
hanging out, holding onto the camera for dear life.
All that was guerrilla film-making, you know,
they stole a lot of those shots.
Of course, in doing a chase as dangerous
as this on the streets, is that nothing
comes off, like wheels, axels.
The dance between the two drivers of those vehicles,
that is teamwork, that's what you're witnessing
there is sort of like two people going through
choreography in tons of steel that could
at any moment be deadly, so there's an
immense amount of trust that needs to happen between.
And not just these two lead guys,
like all the cars that, errrr, sliding out of place
or coming to a stop, they all have to trust
that, that guy's gonna stop.
And this guy has to trust that the lead car
isn't gonna hang out too wide.
So then all we had to do was get the stuntmen,
which we had eight that we thought were the best,
and put them in cars to acts as pedestrians.
So that when we were going by them
at well over 100 miles per hour, we knew what they
were gonna do and they what we were gonna do.
And of course a car coming at that speed, if you
lose it and spin it, the men are in great jeopardy.
It seems real.
It really does seem that that was a no-holds-barred chase.
It really feels like you're there with them
in the driver's seat, it's just thrilling.
The fact that Steve was doing it
made it maybe the coolest car chase
in the history of car chases.
When I watch Bullitt, I believe
that Steve did it all, you know.
And the truth is that he did a lot of it,
and of course, the studio freaked out.
There are gonna be those times where
the risk is that if you're doing that enough,
the possibility and the chances of you getting nailed
become more likely.
Then if he hurts himself, the whole production's screwed.
Your lead guy, if he's out,
the whole production has to stop.
He kind of liked that.
Rebellious, screw you I'm doing it.
He wanted to be as real as anybody could possibly
be real in everything that he played.
The feelings, the sensitivities,
this is the kind of reality
that's important in motion pictures.
You can only do what's in your own heart.
You can only play what ingredients of your psyche
and soul belong to you and have meaning to you.
It's authenticity.
Audiences, especially movie audiences,
can smell out a fake from miles away.
He saw the inside of how police work was really done.
You work your side of the street,
and I'll work mine.
Bullitt was released in October of '68.
The reaction was absolutely through the roof,
and the profits were just crazy.
And Steve McQueen as Bullitt became an instant icon.
This is truly where the Steve McQueen
legend really takes off.
The New York Times, 1968.
"Existential cool."
"Less taut and hardshell than Bogart."
"McQueen simply gets better all the time."
I mean no one looks better in
white Levi corduroys and trainers than Steve McQueen.
No one wears sunglasses like Steve McQueen.
No one can look as wonderful behind
the wheel of a fast car.
He had the X factor.
In big letters, the X factor, sex appeal.
On and off the screen, McQueen was paired
with some of the hottest actresses in Hollywood.
Never one to turn down a good time,
the line between the two worlds began to blur.
At that point in time in Hollywood,
we're talking in the 60's and 70's when
everything was sort of a free-for-all,
I don't really think that he knew how to adjust.
He obviously wanted to retain his family,
and be the family guy, but then there were
these temptations on the other hand
that just made that impossible.
I mean, a beautiful woman wouldn't
have been a real problem, at all.
And I certainly saw women coming up to him,
and they could basically not formulate
three words together because it was Steve McQueen.
There's just something about him for me that's just like,
what was I talking about again?
He'd just look at them and be very charming.
Which he totally could, he had that one down,
which is why he's the king of cool.
Girls would blatantly throw themselves
at my dad in front of their boyfriends or husbands
and he was always so cool about it.
It was just, free love and free everything.
Sometimes he would come to me and say,
"Why do I have to work for love at home"
"when I can get it for free outside?"
Every man I met wanted to be him,
every woman wanted to sleep with him,
every kid wanted to be mentored by him.
He just had that extraordinary, charismatic,
sort of sexual, but dangerous,
but soft underneath,
bright, street smart, power.
He's pretty hot.
I've gone back sometimes and gone,
ok, maybe if I didn't know him to be
as cool as he was, and you just take a random photo,
you see a photo and you're like,
I mean, he has pretty eyes and this and that.
And then you watch any footage where he's talking
and the dude's just hot.
There's no way out.
You've done too good a job, Becky.
Steve's body was really just perfectly shaped,
and he kept it that way.
He had a bus stop sign that he had stolen
from one of the streets of New York,
and he would work out with that.
Being in front of the camera,
being a leading guy like he was,
you've gotta have that physical presence.
Especially when you start wearing a couple hats,
producer and leading man actor,
you've gotta be in great shape to have the concentration
to be able do that for long periods of time.
Because he was that kind of hand-on type of guy,
it was natural for him to gravitate towards
martial arts and towards a sport like that
that's very physical.
There's also a mental discipline involved,
that probably tripped a lot of triggers for him.
And McQueen would train with the very best.
Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, and Pat Johnson.
Steve was probably the most aggressive guy
I've ever, ever trained.
He really wanted to get the martial arts
so he could learn some self-discipline.
He had an ego, no denying that at all,
he had a real short fuse, he could go off in an instant,
but he wanted to learn to control that temper,
as well as know how to fight so if somebody
did get in his face, he'd be able to either walk away
or know, and put the guy out right now.
You're out there all by yourself, you're gonna
get out of it exactly what you put into it.
I can totally see why martial arts and working out
everyday was a really important part of his life.
It's so much more than physically looking good,
it's very mental.
Los Angeles Times, 2010.
"McQueen embodies effortless cool,"
"dangerous masculinity, edgy charisma"
"that are coveted by men, embraced by women."
Everybody knew Steve McQueen was the coolest of them all.
But I found out, as I worked with him,
you know, I think he was a warlock.
I think he was affected by the moon.
I...
I bark and growl and every full moon
I go like this, like an animal.
Whenever there was a full moon,
I'll never forget
his publicity guy said to me,
"You'd better watch him next week,"
"it's a full moon you know."
"He's affected by the moon."
I said, what're you talking about?
And sure enough, he disappeared on his motorbike.
Out on the desert.
It seems kind of strange, I think.
I think there's a little pot going there.
He totally disappeared, and nobody knew where he was.
It was no secret, my dad liked his grass.
And that was the 60's, you know what I mean?
They were trying every fucking thing.
Dennis Hopper told me a story once about
him and my dad and a chief taking mescaline
out in the middle of nowhere in the desert.
Just take it right up to the edge.
Comes to my dad, everything's right
up to the fucking edge, wasn't it?
Do you ever relax, though?
Sure, sure, I'm relaxed right now.
- Are you? - Yeah.
So you do relax, you do seem, just a little thing I was
watching you race, when you're on the motorcycle
you seem to be loose, and there seems to be
a little tenseness about you otherwise.
The only time I really, really, honestly,
relax relax from the tensions, it seems,
as though is when I'm motor racing.
I do relax a lot in speed.
One really has to, you know?
You must stay relaxed, because then if
any trouble comes up, you don't wanna be tense,
you wanna stay very relaxed so that you can cope with it.
He liked the speed and the action and the muscles
and the dirt in your face and the rain,
rocks hitting you and falling off and all that.
It was all part of his world of masculinity.
You're dealing with a few hundred pound motorcycle
and taking it through circumstances that
not a lot of people can handle.
He was very strong, very fast,
and he showed that in the way he rode a motorcycle.
He was very impressive.
If you were in front of him in a race,
sooner or later he'd be on your tail,
because he had to pass you.
That was his personality, and that's why
he was so successful, is because he had to win.
Steve was a natural, racing competitively at Sebring,
Baja, Elsinore, and the International six day trials.
He dug hanging out with guys like that,
he was really, he was in his element.
I think for him, doing movies was about,
it was, he knew he had to get his game face on.
With motorcycles he could just
blend in with the rest of the guys.
He really lived life.
It wasn't like he was in this Hollywood box,
trying to be that actor or trying to be anything,
he just was who he was.
Once he got a helmet on, nobody knew who he was.
He was the biggest star in the country, in the world.
He just wanted to be one of the guys,
he wanted to be one of the racers.
He entered the Elsinore Grand Prix as Harvey Mushman.
You saw that guy with the white helmet
and the yellow Jersey go by, it was Harvey Mushman.
I was a big fan of his, and when I decided
to try and do on any Sunday, I went up to his office in LA.
And he, familiar with the endless summer, that
surf film I made, told him what I wanted to do,
and he went, "Oh, cool, what do you want me to do?"
I went, well, pay for it.
And he started laughing and went, "Hey man",
"I'm in movies, I don't finance them."
I went, well, you can't be in my movie then.
He laughed, and the next day he called me
and said, "Ok, let's go for it."
Put the money up, and he was a great, great partner.
This is Steve McQueen, and I'm proud to have
a little ride on my film.
Whether you ride or not, I think you'll enjoy
on any Sunday.
He loved to go fast.
He would get on his motorcycle,
and he would go ride across the desert
at 60, 70 miles an hour with no shirt, no helmet, nothing.
I would say to him, man, be careful,
you're going to kill yourself.
And he says, "I like living on the edge."
The thing is that most people have the feeling
that motorcyclists are long sideburns,
and those great funny motorcycles and everything,
and they're all kind of looking for trouble and everything,
and that really isn't the case.
People who enter into competition, especially
in the United States, are very good sportsman
and all of them are very keen on the sport, and interested.
And they're some of the best sportsmen
I've ever run in in my life.
When I'm six years old he got me my first minicycle.
Little Benelli.
We used to go three days a week, you know,
after school he'd pick me up and take me
in an area at the Indian dunes, go practise.
During the summer is our races were on Friday nights.
During the winters every Sunday my dad
never missed one, always there.
When he got into vintage motorcycles, same thing.
He'd hang out with the vintage crowd.
The old guys that'd go on runs.
Triumph remade the bike from The Great Escape.
I found out that there was only 1,000 of them being made.
I had to get one.
It was a really cool experience,
me and my dad were driving those bikes around,
of course his is all souped up.
There was just this moment of riding
down by the beach and, I don't know.
It kind of made me feel closer to my grandfather.
It was really cool.
I wish when I was younger that was something
that we could have all experienced together.
He was good, and I saw in that Elsinore race
there was a thousand guys, and he's
finished in the top 10, in both classes.
We were at my house, after the race,
and his foot was like a basketball, all swollen up.
He goes, "I think I broke my foot."
"Well, I know I broke my foot."
Two weeks later, and despite a broken foot,
McQueen would race the gruelling 12 hours of Sebring.
He said he was damned if he's not gonna race the race
and they let him it drive with a cast on his foot.
It's unbelievable.
I busted it, in a motor cycle race
up at lake Elsinore, the hundred miler.
Busted it in six places, and I'd already
said I'd drive, so.
I got the cast on and we just taped it up,
and I can't use a foot rest, we had to cut
part of it off because I'm 5 and 1/8th inches
across the bottom of my foot, and we put
some sandpaper on the bottom, tape it on so I can
keep it on the clutch pedal adjusting it.
He was so at ease.
That's the thing that people don't realise,
I think he was like a born car racer.
Some people just are completely natural.
He lived it 24 hours a day, I mean,
that's all he could talk about.
Racing, racing, racing.
McQueen was neck and neck with Mario Andretti
in the Ferrari 512s, with an average speed
of 113 miles an hour, McQueen and his team
would challenge for the lead in their Porsche 908 Spider
throughout the 12 hour marathon.
In the end, Andretti would cross the finish line
a scant 23 seconds ahead of McQueen.
I think if you were to ask him then
if he was an actor or a race car driver,
he wouldn't have known what to say.
His passion definitely was motor sports.
It was a fix that he had to have.
Racing is life.
Anything that happens before or after
is just waiting.
Nobody else would make a movie about
the 24 hours of Le Mans, except Steve McQueen.
Because it was the thing he knew, the thing
he loved, nobody else would make that movie.
He had been wanting to do that film for 10 years.
He was finally able to bring it to life.
Steve was completely obsessed
with making Le Mans the greatest car racing
movie ever, ever filmed.
He was very obsessed with the action,
and the new way of filming the car racing,
and trying to find ways to show the sport
and to make the person feel like you're part of it,
the audience, in a way that was never done before.
They had really tricked out a car with a lot
of cameras on it, it was a camera car that
actually drove in the race.
That 917 he drove in Le Mans,
every day I would say, dad, you've gotta
give me a ride in this thing, please.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm busy, I'm busy."
They're shooting down the Mulsanne, my dad
and the other cars coming down off the kink
and they're braking to hang the right at Mulsanne corner.
He opens the door, and he, "Come on, come here."
I'm gonna get a ride in the 917.
So he sat me down on his lap,
and I remember the seatbelts sticking
into my back, and I kind of went to the side,
and that sound of the flat 12, and the G forces
as a kid, pressing back into my dad.
There's nothing to hold onto for me,
so I put my hand on top of my dad's glove,
on the wheel of the 917.
He went through the first three, going wah, wah.
And then just for a brief second, he took
his hands off, so I was actually steering a 917
at ten years old.
I think that's what got me addicted to motor sports
and driving myself, was that feeling that I felt,
the g-force, and the sound,
and sitting so low with the fenders up high like that,
it just, the whole thing was an addicting experience,
to say the least.
Le Mans was kind of a crazy experience.
It was doomed from the beginning.
He wasn't focused, he'd much rather hang out
with the guys than hang out with the executives.
John Sturges wanted to make it a love story
with the race as a background, and McQueen
was like, I didn't wait to make this movie to have
the race be the background, it's about the race.
Sturges kept saying, "Where's the human story?"
Because it was just all about machines.
So you had them bumping heads from the very beginning.
John wanted the script, and there was no script.
I don't think Steve McQueen says anything
for the first 35 minutes of that film,
but you're just sort of drawn to it.
It's almost like you could smell it,
that's how visceral and visual it is.
He was in the car five days a week,
and going racing speeds, and he said,
"Every day I thought I was gonna get killed."
It was a very, very dangerous film set.
There was rain, there were crashes,
there was a driver that lost his leg.
And I think in a way, it's like the painter's madness.
I think that he went mad a little bit
in the making of the film, the obsession took over.
He lost control, he went nuts.
Le Mans was a disaster film for everyone involved.
It was a disaster for me, it was a disaster for Steve,
it was disastrous for his relationship with John Sturges.
He wasn't showing up to the filming,
the director got fed up, John Sturges.
They finally had a big blowout, and John left.
And they replaced the director.
From then, it just became something different.
In asserting himself and, essentially,
departing company with John Sturges,
who he'd been so successful with,
and getting a television director to come in
and really having McQueen direct this movie,
perhaps he wasn't threatened.
He wanted to be a film-maker, and he was
being adored by everybody, everything was
yes, Steve, and yes, that.
And Steve was difficult at that time,
I'm sure the director did the best he could.
I don't think Steve was that cooperative.
One thing led to another, and things just
began to disintegrate.
The whole thing, they took the money away
from Steve, they took the production,
they took everything away from Steve.
And everybody, at that point in time,
seemed to be doing drugs.
That was the start of the tearing of the family.
I guess it was just getting too heavy.
I think the issue was Steve, at the time,
he was distracted by cars, car racing,
motorcycle racing, women.
There were times that I didn't look away,
and there was a time when I retaliated,
and when I did, the marriage never recovered from that.
He had a terrible temper, you know.
It just, he...
He terrified me, so...
So I just said I had to leave.
With Le Mans, McQueen was all in.
He gambled everything on Le Mans, and he lost.
Los Angeles Times, 1971.
"Le Mans loses revs the minute it gets off the track."
"It is more than a little schizophrenic."
At the age of 40, Steve McQueen now found
himself divorced, broke, and doesn't really know
what's gonna happen with his movie career,
because he suffered this huge flop.
Luckily enough, he came across a script called
The Getaway by Jim Thompson.
Straight ahead.
The Getaway, obviously, life changing
experience for Steve McQueen.
Meets his co-star, Ali MacGraw.
Hi, Doc.
McQueen produced The Getaway.
The casting process was very simple.
Steve said I want the girl from love story.
I was married to Robert Evans,
who was then the head of Paramount.
She's married to Robert Evans,
perhaps the most powerful man in Hollywood.
But yet, this is still Steve McQueen.
Steve called and said, "I want to talk to you"
"about doing this film and maybe using your wife."
I had to be talked into doing it,
I thought I was wrong for the part,
then they all said wow, you get to work with
Steve McQueen, this is an absolutely brilliant
career move.
Of course I knew he was one of the biggest stars
in the world, but that in itself was kind of intimidating
because I was such a neophyte.
I had no clue how to play in that lead.
First day with Steve on The Getaway,
he and Sam Peckinpah picked me up at the airport
and did like 360's down the freeway.
That was kind of a wow, we're all gonna have a very
different kind of life than you're used to,
you repressed, New England non-actress.
Have a look at this.
As soon as they meet, there's this instant electricity.
I do literally remember watching him walk out
of the house, to the edge of the pool,
which was the colour of his eyes, which I could
see from 700 feet.
I mean, it was an overwhelming, visceral turn-on,
who is that kind of feeling.
You know, it's a stunner, it doesn't happen a lot.
The attraction was electrifying, it was scary.
It was a foregone conclusion that
something was gonna happen.
Of course then actually, she leaves Robert Evans,
head of production to Paramount, for Steve McQueen,
while they're making The Getaway.
Steve McQueen had that sort of power.
Steve fell in love with the girl from love story,
and Ali fell in love with one of the most
charismatic actors of the century.
It was a no-brainer really.
Los Angeles times, 1972.
"Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw generate between"
"them as much electricity as any of the fabled"
"screen teams of the past."
It was like being a student on an advanced film set.
Sam Peckinpah once said, "If you want to learn
"everything there is to know about acting for film,
"watch his eyes." and that's powerfully true.
Nobody that I've ever watched has come close
to doing what he did.
There are many great things to do,
he nailed his version for all time.
In one of the most challenging roles
of his career, McQueen would put it all on the line
in a role based on a true character
who would risk everything to be free.
In Papillon, there was just this
broken man, and that was amazing to see.
All his other movies, he was very strong.
There was always this steel wall
that no one was gonna get through.
That was the movie you just saw that kind of crumble.
Franklin Schaffner did a brilliant movie,
and they killed themselves for it.
They were up to your waist in hot, bug-infested
Jamaican mud and blistering heat.
It's physical.
It's mental, emotional, and physical.
You're just in that awful situation with them.
To grind, 12, 14 hour-plus days
on a lot of days, there's a physicality to that,
there's a mental discipline that it takes
to stay focused and on task.
You'll be killed.
You know that.
Maybe.
He insisted that he was doing that stunt himself,
he wasn't gonna have some stuntman do it for him.
My assumption was it must've not been Steve,
because we were so wired we couldn't tell if it was or not,
so why not get in on his face?
That seems sort of wasteful to me in this day and age,
I guess back then maybe it was more like, well,
he's just gonna do it so we'll shoot it how we'd
normally shoot it instead of it being five cameras on it.
And we want one on his face, and we want to see him
all in one frame, and once, you know, I wanna see that.
With The Getaway in '72 and then Papillon in '73,
if there was a sense after Le Mans that the decade
of Steve McQueen had come to an end,
those two films certainly shattered it.
They were box office successes, they were largely
critical successes, and Steve McQueen was back on top.
After Papillon, Steve was exhausted.
We lived at the beach, and he said,
"I want a break."
On a good day, and there were many, many, many, good days,
we were the most ordinary,
all-American, happy family.
Chad lived with us, which is great
because he looked so up to his father,
and I found Steve a terrific father.
Really caring.
At the end of the summer it's time to go
back to school, it was like, fuuuuck.
My dad came home one night and says, "Listen",
"you can live with me if you want, or your mum, whatever."
I thought about it, I think it took me half a second,
and I said I'm going where the action is.
Dad, I'm going with you.
Architects.
Yeah, it's all our fault.
Now you know there's no sure way to fight a fire
for anything over the seventh floor, but you guys
just keep building them as high as you can.
Are you trying to take me on, or the fire?
McQueen had had this rivalry with Newman
that dated back to McQueen's really small role
in Somebody Up There Likes Me, which was one
of Newman's first great on-screen successes.
It was so unnecessary, they're both brilliant
and beautiful and, I mean, ridiculous.
I never knew Paul enough to know whether he had anything,
but I know Steve had a little thing on about him.
In the late 60's in George Roy Hill's
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McQueen
passes up an opportunity to star with Paul Newman.
Again, it's this sort of huge chip
on his shoulder that drives him.
It was resentment, though, that Newman really
didn't know about or participate in.
And then it comes back to strike again
during The Towering Inferno, he wanted to have
exactly the same number of lines.
It is ironic to have Steve McQueen at any point
in his career fighting for dialogue.
We'll plug it and splice it into the timer,
set it, it blows.
It was not a computer generated thing,
it was a very, very insane set.
They were setting fire to walls and flooding rooms,
and I think it was fun for him.
Roger Ebert, 1974.
"A masterpiece of stunt coordination"
"and special effects, The Towering Inferno"
"is a brawny blockbuster of a movie."
McQueen gets a big salary up front,
but he also gets points on the back end,
a significant number of points,
and he ends up making 14 million dollars.
In today's dollars, we're talking like
60 to 80 million dollars.
He was a superb film actor without any doubt,
but like a handful of people he had this kind of,
bits of danger, like what are you really gonna do.
Underneath that there was tremendous insecurity
and softness and sensitivity, but the survival mechanism
was that combustible,
dangerous, mysterious,
now you see it, now you don't.
When it was good, it was very, very, very good,
and when it was bad, it was horrendous.
There was no kind of grey, boring ground.
It's all in love or all out of love,
it's 100 percent one way or the other.
That's how he was.
And the heat of skyrockets in the night
passionate love, you just go wow, it's always
gonna be like this, but it isn't.
He was the biggest movie star in the world, but I
was having my five minutes of being pretty conspicuous.
You're running in the fast Lane, and people
are clapping every time you turn the corner.
We were both having such a difficult time communicating,
it was one of those explosions.
I'd wake up in the morning and go down
to the kitchen, and there'd be a fucking plate
sailing past my head.
They were throwing plates.
The kids don't know who's going where,
they're scared when they hear arguments,
they're relieved when they hear that you're
happy together, they wonder why they can't go
to father's day weekend because he's in some
other country, where's your mother, I mean,
it's a rotten family scenario.
The fact that our marriage wasn't working
was very disturbing to him.
He was not happy, and I was unhappy,
and we weren't doing anything about it.
He sort of checked out.
Yeah, you know.
Eventually they didn't see eye to eye.
The time she was there was pretty fun, it was good.
McQueen not only left Ali, he left Hollywood.
The star machine, the highs, the lows,
the whole crazy thing.
He didn't want anything to do with a movie role.
He wouldn't even let a script come to the house,
I'd have to go pick it up at the gas station.
McQueen walks away from Hollywood,
but Hollywood doesn't necessarily want him to walk away.
Every great role of the 70's that you can think of
was offered to McQueen first.
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, First Blood,
The Gauntlet, Apocalypse Now, all these great
classic films that sort of fit the McQueen type,
and he turned it all down.
At 47, McQueen decided to start a whole new life.
At age 23, Barbara Minty was the perfect partner.
She was a cover girl.
She's very young, very exotic, my dad saw her.
It was an Ad for Club Med.
It was my butt.
I was turned around, I was clicking my heels up,
and I guess maybe he liked the spirit?
My dad when he sees somebody
on the cover of a magazine, Hello.
When I first laid eyes on him at the Beverly Wilshire,
he was a scruffy, scary, looked like a homeless old hobo.
He asked really serious questions,
he was going to my soul, my heart,
and I think he was that kind of a guy that
he wanted to know if I was real and if I
was gonna mess with him or do anything.
She liked Coors Light and Old Milwaukee
like we did, so she fit right in.
We definitely matched, the ages were
a little different, but it worked.
We just loved the same things.
It was all trucks, we all drove trucks from the 40's.
We just had so much fun together,
it was just easy.
I liked cars and motorcycles and, you know,
good pick-up trucks.
I toured the Western states with him
looking for a ranch for him to buy
because he wanted to get out of LA.
He just said, "Honey, come on."
"We're gonna go to Santa Paula airport, I found something."
Here's the hangar, next day you have a plane,
the next day you have 30 motorcycles with the plane,
and then it's "Honey, I bought a house."
It was a great little house, it was so perfect for us.
It was old, we had the old pull-chain toilets.
I think he was happy, it was a whole new Steve.
Then had a couple years here, then we had a year
in the hangar, and this was his little privacy.
This was his play-land.
He was walking around the airport and he happened
upon a guy, a World War II veteran, Perry Schreffler.
Steve asked Perry, "What would be"
"the best way to learn how to fly?"
And Perry said well, that's the way I learned
how to fly, with a military instructor and a Stearman.
I don't think he even thought about it,
he just went home and bought two Stearman,
and he learned how to fly.
He was sitting in the john, reading
Trade a Plane, and he called a guy from the potty,
and bought it.
Steve's first Stearman he only owned
for a day or two because my dad made one comment
that he didn't think it was a good Stearman, so instantly
Steve got rid of that and bought that Stearman.
He could drive cars, and he could ride motorcycles,
but he was a shitty pilot.
There's Steve McQueen the actor, and Steve McQueen
the man, so I was lucky enough to know the man.
We had quiet times.
I got a quieter, more mature McQueen.
We used to get in the old pick-up truck,
and we'd just go driving.
He'd say, "Well, it's gonna be for a week or two",
"so pack a little more."
We'd just go for a while, it was fun.
It was insane, actually.
And the life that he chose to live,
with the particular movies he chose
to do after he and I were divorced,
I think was the life that he wanted to live.
Steve McQueen really used himself 100 percent,
and he didn't really go outside of that box.
He played to his own strengths and his own
passions and his own imagination,
and found pieces that fit him like a glove.
Living his new life, McQueen would climb back
in the saddle to play rogue lawman Tom Horn.
People don't realise this, but he was a film-maker.
Tom Horn he pretty much directed himself.
He asked me to be the assistant director
and take care of him while he's making this picture.
But a week into the picture, he looks over at me
and I say, what's wrong?
He says, "I can't do it any more."
"My director is driving me crazy."
He knew what he wanted, it was his film,
he wanted it filmed a certain way,
he wanted everybody to do it his way.
We drove into the compound where the dressing
rooms were and et cetera, and he got out of the truck,
walked into the director's motorhome, and fired him.
He was difficult, I would say.
I wouldn't wanna work for him.
Like my dad was with everything else,
you know, 100 percent.
He lived out on the set, with Barbara in the motorhome.
We had a house in Tuscon, a penthouse
at like the Hilton, we had all these beautiful
places to stay but we stayed in the RV,
and absolutely had the best time ever.
All of a sudden this limousine pulled up,
and a guy in a suit got out, walked over to talk
to Steve for a couple of minutes,
got back in the car again and drove off.
I said, what's going on?
He held up a check,
and that check was for a lot of money.
I mean, a lot of money, and he just folded it up,
turned around, and walked back into the trailer.
He was a very big man at that time, and he knew it.
He always was concerned about his lungs,
and he would say, "What would happen if"
"your lungs were bad or you couldn't breathe?"
Keep your nerve, Sam.
Because I'm gonna keep mine.
It was there, in some little way, you could see
he'd be protective about this or that, and you just
left it alone immediately, you didn't get involved.
I was working as a production assistant,
and we knew he was sick, but I never thought,
like everything else, that anything was gonna happen to him.
He's bulletproof.
We thought it was desert fever or something like that,
and when they went and did the chest x-rays,
the doctor in Santa Paula said to go
to the big hospital in Los Angeles.
And that's where they found out,
and that's where the doctor said.
He went up for that exploratory surgery at Cedar-Sinai.
I remember getting there that day and they said,
hey, we got the test back, and my dad was like, shit.
A friend called and said,
you need to know that...
God, this is a bad story.
That Steve has cancer.
How do you know that?
Because somebody in the examination room at the hospital
took that x-ray and leaked it to the trashy press
it gave a lot of people their first glimpse
into just how horrible tabloid journalism can be.
I think this is the most immoral thing
that I've ever witnessed.
The manner in which they got the story
was just horrible and embarrassing to anybody
who cares about journalism and certainly
terrible for anybody that cares about Steve McQueen.
I'm not going there because it pisses
me off to this day.
I've still got a little anger management
with the doctors, but,
but there is no cure.
50 years old, it was way too early
for this story to happen, and yet he'd been
exposed to asbestos, which is, I gather,
was the specific root of that cancer.
He was in the marines, and he was cleaning out the...
Of course he went and chased some girl
and he got in trouble, and they made him
clean out the hulls of these ships.
And they had asbestos.
That's where he breathed in the asbestos
and the asbestos, mesothelioma takes probably usually
20-some years to get into your body and get going.
It was so sad for me, because this
good looking, handsome man, just so full
of energy, so full of life,
was suddenly really thin, emaciated.
This was something internal, something was eating him
from the insides, something was taking over his body.
When you're riding the bike and the wind's
in your hair and you're going 60 miles an hour,
he's God.
But then, I think he felt the vulnerability,
and I think that vulnerability turned to
some questioning about what it's all about.
If he had a great fear, it was of dying young.
I went to see him, I went up to his room,
to his bedroom,
and the fan was whirring around,
and there he was, you know?
And I stood above him for a while,
and then he opened his eyes
and he said, "Hi, honey."
I said hi, I said, how're you feeling?
He said, "Not good."
He said, "I thought I'd never see you again."
And those were the last words we said to each other.
He asked me about some painkillers and I suggested
the one that you should be working with is morphine,
because he was obviously in a lot of pain.
And he asked me, he said, "What shall I do?"
And I said, Steve, you have no choice.
You've gotta go to Mexico.
He knew the doctors wrote him off here
in the United States, that's why he went to Mexico.
He wasn't about to stop fighting.
He fought like a son of a bitch to stay alive.
He fought so hard.
And he didn't wanna go,
he could not accept it.
Because he liked to win, he couldn't understand.
He tried his hardest, and you know what?
Cancer sucks.
It's an intensely private time, and it
had passed the time when it was about who's
married to him, and it was none of that.
It was just trying to think about how he and his
immediate, his new wife, his family, Niele and Terry
and Chad, could best be taken care of.
We were down in fucking Juarez, in Mexico,
and this clinic, they couldn't get our blood type
down there in Mexico, so they had me eating
raw steaks and hit me twice a day for blood.
They're wheeling him to surgery,
and the last thing he says to me is,
"You'll be alright, son."
But I didn't put it together, I didn't think about it.
But I think he knew he wasn't gonna make it.
The call came at about 3 o'clock in the morning.
And Terry said, "Mum, dad just died."
Every life lesson, I got from him.
Good, bad, or indifferent.
And even though he passed so young at 50,
boy, he crammed everything in.
He crammed it all in.
McQueen fought to live his life his way,
squaring off against anyone who slowed him down.
His roles mirrored his own life.
He was the king of cool, the lone wolf.
Steve McQueen was an original.
The characters that you've played on the screen,
who have been loners, they've been rebellious,
a little bit moody. Have you interjected your own personality
- into these characters and... - Yeah.
- If you are loner... - Yeah.