Steve McQueen on Blitz and how it tells a different kind of war story

23:58Steve McQueen: His new film Blitz & how it tells a different kind of war story

Steve McQueen doesn't remember being told about the Blitz as a child, but the evidence of it was all around him in the streets of London as well as in the collective consciousness.

"It's a part of the British national psyche," the Oscar-winning filmmaker tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "People, obviously, sort of wear it as a badge of honour. The Blitz spirit, a stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on — all these phrases come from that particular period."

His latest film, Blitz, looks at that chapter in history through the eyes of a child. The story follows a nine-year-old biracial boy named George (Elliott Heffernan) who's evacuated to the countryside for his safety, just like hundreds of thousands of other British children. Determined to return home, George defiantly jumps off the train and embarks on a perilous journey back to London as his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), searches for him.

The idea for the film came from a photograph McQueen found in his research. "I came across this image of this boy, this Black child [at] a train station, ready to be evacuated with his suitcase and his cat," he says. "I knew that he would be not just in danger of the enemy above, but the enemy on the ground, too."

In Blitz, George not only encounters the traumas of war but also tremendous racism. He meets a kind police officer from Nigeria named Ife (Benjamin Clementine) who watches out for him.

Rather than relying on old war movie tropes, McQueen wanted to make a different kind of war drama that explored the racism, sexism and classism that he says is "buried underground" the foundations of Great Britain. He worked with historian Joshua Levine, the author of The Secret History of the Blitz, who helped him accurately portray how cosmopolitan and diverse London was at the time.

"There was a large Chinese community, there were a lot of Black people, Asian people," McQueen says. "It was very sort of vibrant, you know. So it was interesting in the sense that when you do see movies of that period, there are no people of any particular colour."

While the film doesn't feature scenes of British soldiers fighting Nazis, McQueen says it is about the fight for the right to exist.

"That fighting is unfortunately sort of echoed even today," he says. "Blitz is about 1940, but you could say it's about 2024, absolutely…. All the research I had brought so many interesting things to the surface. And it wasn't about ticking boxes. Actually, the base of the movie was about George — who was a small boy who I discovered as such in my research — and his mother. It's about their connection more than anything else."

The full interview with Steve McQueen is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Steve McQueen produced by Lise Hosein.