Years ago, Britain’s Imperial War Museum commissioned Steve McQueen to produce artwork about British troops in the Iraq War, and he decided to embed with soldiers in Basra.
“Being in a war zone is very strange because they call it a theater,” he said at the Middleburg Film Festival, where he received the Visionary Director Award. At times, he felt as if he were surrounded by “a cast of characters whose individual stories formed a sentimental narrative.”
That experience inspired the nationalism behind Blitz, McQueen’s new World War II epic, in theaters and Nov. 22 on Apple TV Plus — about boy named George (Elliott Heffernan), age 9, who is evacuated with other children to the countryside during Germany’s eight-month bombing campaign on British cities.
About 40,000 civilians were killed in raids between September 1940 and May 1941, nearly half in London. George is reluctant to leave and escapes government custody, traversing the war-torn capital, hoping to reunite with his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), who works at munitions factory, and stoic grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller).
“On the ground, I was interested in how people had to deal with the decisions of politicians,” McQueen said of his time in Iraq. “How war is declared, and civilians have to deal with the consequences.”
McQueen, 55, had long pondered a feature about the Blitz, a period of massive destruction with lasting effect on the national psyche. It happened while conducting research for his 2020 film anthology Small Axe, when he encountered a photo of young Black boy waiting to be evacuated at a London train station in 1940. George’s journey is his imagined telling.
On Blitz, he enlisted collaborators, such as the Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer (“The Lion King,” “Dune”), who previously worked with the director on “12 Years a Slave.” Zimmer noted that “Blitz” doesn’t frame the conflict as “a tidy, heroic, we-are-all-brothers-here type of war.” Instead, “there’s a war within a war going on in this film.” His score is filled with turbulent emotion, ditching orchestral swells at times to project percussive cacophony.
Zimmer says: “I thought the way to do it was to basically write music that was so provocative, so dissonant, so disorganized, so at the edge of unbearable that adults would feel the terror and horror that our main protagonist in the movie feels … and that my mother must have lived through.” McQueen is “uncompromising in his work,” and so is Zimmer.
Anyone who collaborates with the filmmaker must be prepared to give it their all. Production designer Adam Stockhausen, who also worked on “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows,” agreed to McQueen’s vision of relying on many real locations. Stockhausen and set decorator Anna Pinnock turned the port city of Kingston upon Hull into the East London neighborhood where George and his family live. They shot at train station nearby for the scene in which George is sent away, filling it with extras to capture the overwhelming panic.
Stockhausen is also known for working with Spielberg and Wes Anderson, the latter partnership earning him and Pinnock an Oscar for The Grand Budapest Hotel. His ambitious work on “Blitz” involved the re-creation of a London Underground station that flooded because of the bombs. Rather than building 20 feet of the Balham station platform and filling in the rest via green screen, they made 175 feet of it on stage and, after waterproofing the interior, filled the set with water.
“Being in that physical space and having thousands of gallons come flooding in, you felt it in your gut,” Stockhausen said. “Having them in real water, having them actually falling off the platform (in a safe way) mattered a lot to Steve.”
However, the most powerful storytelling in “Blitz” takes place in the aftermath of bombings. “It’s about living in the dead,” McQueen said. “It’s about limbo.” Stockhausen’s team built buildings to destroy.
In one moving scene, George makes his way through ruins. “You’re looking into these boxes of rooms everywhere, and what you’re really looking into is these people’s lives,” Stockhausen explained. “You’re seeing their living rooms, their kitchens. There’s rawness to that, and sense of loss that’s very present.”
“As human beings, we seem to be stuck in this mad cycle,” McQueen said. “I’m grateful for the film at this time because war is heightened in people’s minds — but at the same time, people are desensitized to it. I think seeing it through George’s eyes can hopefully awaken us.”
