Material similar to Shame, to use an immature and simplistic description, could easily falter into emotion porn. With a story that’s, on the surface, about a self-loathing sex addict, overwrought drama is easy to get into, even with the slightest lack of subtlety. This could be one of those films where characters are emotionally tortured for the sake of torture, with no greater meaning. Co-writer and director Steve McQueen, who is surely aware of the dramatic trickiness of Shame, takes a more sensitive and observant approach. McQueen uses his cold and perfect framing to create the atmosphere and world Brandon’s created, not to draw attention to himself as a filmmaker. This, among many other topics, is what I recently discussed with the press tour-exhausted filmmaker. Here’s what Steve McQueen had to say about internal writing, powerful expressions, capturing beautiful butterflies, and why films can be important:

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr walks around his apartment naked, rents out hookers of various shapes and sizes then tries to pick up married women on a subway. He figures if it’s good enough for Michael Fassbender in Steve McQueen’s Shame, then it’s good enough for anyone. Of course, this leads Kevin to spending most of the rest of the day weeping in his birthday suit. Shaking off the humiliation, he decides to take in some culture and give Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus a gander, being one of them Shakespeare pictures and all. Unfortunately, he never stops giggling about the name of the movie long enough to decipher all of the fancy Elizabethan language, and Kevin ends up weeping again, curled up naked in his shower.

Tim Disney’s American Violet, opening in limited release today, is a well-acted but heavy-handed message movie that could have used a subtler approach.

The racially charged drama, set during the 2000 election season, stars newcomer Nicole Beharie as a mother of four wrongfully accused of being a drug dealer.