Photo : John Phillips ( Getty Images for BFI )

Life can be pretty shitty these days, with Trump doing all sorts of bad stuff, famous people in Hollywood doing all sorts of bad stuff, and people you encounter every day even doing all sorts of bad stuff, but director Steve McQueen is sick of allowing the grim realities of normal life to creep into his movies. Appearing on British TV series The Andrew Marr Show (via Deadline) , McQueen—who is promoting Widows, a movie where a group of women have to pull off a heist after their husbands are killed—noted that the world right now is so “dark” and “heavy” that it’s bringing him down.


“I think I need to shake off the blues and make us all happy,” said McQueen, adding “I want to do a musical” because he knows that would at least make himself happy. McQueen’s previous films included the harrowing sex addiction drama Shame, the harrowing Irish prisoner drama Hunger, and the even more harrowing 12 Years A Slave, so it might seem odd for him to suddenly make a crowd-pleasing musical, but McQueen was an accomplished video artist who made artsy short films before he made movies, so there is already a precedent for him to pivot toward unexpected things. That being said, a musical could certainly be grim and harrowing, so maybe he’ll do that anyway.