Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen's latest, Blitz, releases on AppleTV+ on Nov. 22.Chris Pizzello/The Associated Press
Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen is mulling what it means to be “in theatre,” an expression used by troops to refer to being in a war zone. He repeats it – “in theatre” – as if to underline the words without explicitly drawing out the correlation between devastating combat and spectacle. Instead, he just lets it hang there.
We’re speaking on a Zoom call, a couple of weeks before McQueen’s latest movie, Blitz, will have its world premiere at the London Film Festival. He’s describing how the seeds were planted for the film, which takes a harrowing look at the German bombing campaign – the Blitzkrieg – that ravaged London during the Second World War. He traces its beginnings to 2003, when the Imperial War Museum commissioned him as an official War Artist in Iraq, stationed with the boots on the ground, where he gained a visceral understanding of being “in theatre.”
“It was the first time I felt a sense of camaraderie,” says McQueen, who was born in London to West Indian parents, and whose films 12 Years A Slave, Widows and the five-part Small Axe anthology pick at the racial and class tensions that inform both American and British society. In conversation, McQueen digs deeper into how the bond between soldiers from Glasgow to Liverpool – with the different backgrounds and regional accents that can sow discord – affected him. “I was feeling a sense of unity – of camaraderie or nationalism – because of war. That was strange, that perversity, bonding through war.”
The tension he’s describing resonates throughout Blitz, which zeroes in on the way London’s civilians were forced to set aside their differences – and bigotry – not because of some greater empathy or enlightenment, but as a survival mechanism while under bombardment.
The film, which is landing on AppleTV+ November 22, stars Saoirse Ronan as Rita, a mother scrambling to locate her lost 9-year-old son George (Elliott Heffernan) while German warplanes rain bombs from the skies. George, whose father, like McQueen’s, is Grenadian, has escaped from the trains evacuating London’s children from the bombarded zones, desperate to find his mother instead of the safety he’s been promised. On his search – navigating the streets, shelters and even the famous Café du Paris nightclub that continued entertaining the rich while the explosions rocked their surroundings – George meets everyday heroes, villains and corpses.
Blitz can be deceptively conventional. It’s a linear coming-of-age odyssey observing war through a child’s eyes. McQueen suggests that the film is his take on British epics such as Out of Africa and A Passage To India, except that he doesn’t flirt with romanticizing colonialism.
But what makes Blitz anything but conventional – beyond the foregrounding of marginalized figures often buried in historical narratives and those strikingly expressionistic touches you’d expect from McQueen – is its scaffolding. The film is a love story between mother and child that pays close attention to how society shifts and functions during wartime. We’re watching civilians of all races and classes contributing to the war machine and community survival, while navigating their fraught relationship to each other and the spaces they’re in. It’s all par for the course for a director who, in past films such as 12 Years a Slave and Widows, explored the intersection of geography, economics and human capital in all its intricacy.
“You have to have an understanding of landscape to understand where your characters figure in that environment,” says McQueen. “The audience will have an understanding of what’s at stake, and what’s to gain within the landscape.”
According to McQueen, a big part of what made him want to make Blitz is London’s landscape as he experienced it growing up in the eighties, where the trauma from the Blitzkrieg can be observed in the architecture, like modern buildings erected in the bombed-out spaces between old terraced housing – and in the British “stiff upper lip” attitude. His Blitz is about identity forged in hellfire, not just for George but for London.
At this point, I refocus on the present. McQueen just made a movie about how the trauma from nearly a century ago lives on in British society today. I ask him what the bombardment we’ve been seeing for the past year in Gaza, and now Lebanon, will mean for people’s psyches decades from now.
“Precisely,” he exclaims, nodding his head dramatically and pointing back at me like I hit the most obvious nail on its head. He started working on Blitz before the current phase in the decades long Israel-Palestine conflict, but was reflecting on the horrifying images from Gaza while making his movie.
“I made this picture not about Churchill or Truman or Roosevelt or Monty or Patton,” says McQueen, referring to the prominent commanders and heads of states from the Second World War. “It was about Rita, George and [his grandfather] Gerald. It was about the normal ordinary people who are on the ground, similar to what we’re seeing right now. The leaders are the ones who made the decisions. Us normal people are the ones who have to deal with the consequences of that. That’s what I wanted to focus on.”
He continues reflecting on Gaza as well as the horrors happening in Sudan. “I wanted to remind people things don’t just happen to far off distant countries. [The Blitz] happened here. How could you not be sympathetic or understanding to something which is going on thousands of miles away?”