Interview: Director Steve McQueen on Capturing War Through the Eyes of a Child and Providing Love With ‘Blitz’
Throughout his filmography, one word comes to mind when thinking about the work of writer-director Steve McQueen; meticulous. From his early short films in the 1990s where he was influenced by the French New Wave and the films of Andy Warhol to his stunning feature films to his delicate, detailed documentary work, there are very few artists on the planet right now that preserve and present stories like McQueen. With Hunger, he was able to expertly showcase a stunning portrait of a Bobby Sands and IRA hunger strike, following that debut up with Shame, a striking, visceral examination of sexual addiction, each film lead by powerful lead performances from actor Michael Fassbender. His third film, 12 Years a Slave, saw the British director tackle slavery in the American south through the eyes of Soloman Northup’s story, a African American man kidnapped and forced into servitude while his family and life in the North moved on without him. It has become on the most definitive films about slavery, already standing the test of time a vital piece of filmmaking, resulting in critical and commercial success, as well as garnering nine Oscar nominations with three wins for Best Picture (McQueen won as a producer), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actress for Lupita Nyong’o. He followed that feature film up with Widows, a neo-noir heist thriller centering on four wives who attempt to steal 5 million dollars to pay off their deceased husband’s debt. Widows, just like Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years a Slave, not only ranks among the best films of their respective years, but also demonstrates the creative versatility and emotional range found at the core of each of these stories. By the end of the 2010s, McQueen solidified himself as one of the great modern masters of cinema and someone whom we should pay attention to going forward with whatever film they make next.
During the pandemic, McQueen released his most extensive narrative work of his career in Small Axe, a five-part anthology series telling specific stories about the lives of West Indian immigrants living in London from the 1960s to the 1980s. In doing research for that series, McQueen came across a picture of a young black boy surrounded by the rubble and desolation of World War II. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but for McQueen, that picture was a gateway into his latest feature film, Blitz. In Blitz, we are taken on a Charles Dickens like journey through the eyes of the Blitz from the perspective of a small boy named George, who is a defiant young man who is trying to make his way home back to his mother as the war worsens around them. In making Blitz, he has made his biggest film yet; a vast, tense war vehicle with both a yearning to examine the horrors of war around us as well as being a vessel containing the thing that unites us all in times of crisis; love. In her review for AwardsWatch from last month’s London Film Festival, – Iana Murray said that Blitz “offers a refreshing counterpoint to the nostalgia” to the war pictures we’ve seen before, and a “fascinating” film overall.
In a recent, lengthy conversation with the Oscar winning writer-director, McQueen and I were able to discuss his research process into making Blitz, working with his lead performers Elliott Heffernan and Saoirse Ronan, crafting the production design, sound and score for the film, and his duty as an artist to make crucial, insightful art, especially right now in our turbulent modern world. Just by talking with the director before, during, and after the interview, you can pick up instantly that he wants to make sure every detail he is expressing to you is one hundred percent correct and accurate. He is, after all, someone who is deeply enamored with the idea of telling the truth. Whether it was restarting the recording at the top to make sure the sound of people passing by the lobby had gone away to making sure names of his craft team were mention by their full name for credit or films he used to research were highlighted by their title and year of release by myself; in doing this, it felt like I was being directed by the man, which felt surreal and a journey worth going on to make sure every detail he mentioned or spoke on was the truth. Steve McQueen is a very meticulous, precise artist, and for me, it’s in that attention to detail that makes him one of the best, most influential filmmakers we have working today.
Ryan McQuade: You’ve talked, in doing your research for Small Axe, that you found an image of a young boy surrounded by war, and that was the launching point for the film. What was the feeling like when you saw that image and what about it struck you personally?
Steve McQueen: I wanted to protect him. It was about protection. I wanted to protect him. That was my first instinct. I think when I saw that photograph, I was like, this beautiful, sweet boy going to be evacuated, this Black child, knowing all the dangers that come with that. Being a Black child in London in 1940, I just wanted to protect him. That was my first instinct and I want to know his story.
RM: When you found that photo, was that a surprise to you to see? Because we don’t see a lot of stories like this. Like you’ve mentioned in Q&A’s, we don’t see George’s story a lot on screen or talked about in the history books or movies about events like the Blitz.
SM: No, I kind of knew that there were Black children who were evacuated. Again, there’ve been Black people living in Britain since Roman times, so it’s not nothing new. But at the same time, it sort of refocused me, triggered me as a way in on that particular time and place and brought a narrative to life through his eyes, because obviously the trepidation and everything that he would’ve gone through and that was it sort of thing. That was the initial idea.
RM: So I think that it’s a wonderful choice to set this film through George’s eyes, through a child’s perspective on war because it can be very straightforward, it can be haunting, it can be harrowing, it can be a discovery of truth. Why is the best way for you to tell a war story here; through a child’s eyes?
SM: Well, I think the best way of saying it is a story contextualized by war. I mean, again, what was interesting for me was it’s almost like I thought of fairy tales, like Hansel and Gretel or more like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, Jack and Beanstalk, those kinds of tales. But mainly based on the Brothers Grimm because they’re very dark, terrifying, at the same time, revealing stories. But at the same time, the whole idea from a child’s perspective, like most things, is three or four times bigger in a child’s eyes, and is our camera. So you see within many angles, the camera’s fairly low a lot of the time, so everything is bigger than. I mean the war is hell already, but you amplify it three, four times the size through a child’s eyes.
And also you think to yourself as an adult, “What the hell are we doing?” Again, one puts themselves in George’s perspective, and therefore sees everything. It’s like when you have a child, I’m a father, and when a child shows you a leaf, but you’ve seen a leaf all the time, it’s almost like with a child’s, it’s like the first time you’ve seen a leaf. So what it does is through George’s perspective, through his gaze, it refocuses your gaze. Brings you back to a place where things were right and wrong, good and bad.
RM: Yeah. They’re brutally honest children, and they show you things that you’re never going to see or that perspective, clearly.
SM: Yes, children are very confrontational because they don’t lie.
RM: No, you are one hundred percent right.
SM: And often, as adults, we go around pretending we don’t hear things, we don’t see or compromise, and children aren’t just very, very brutal. Just like George says to his mother, “I hate you. I hate you.” Children know how to hurt you. Again, there’s a real purity in a way, for lack of a better word.
RM: The research started obviously with the photo, but you have to then create and expand off of that in grand detail. So in working with your production designer Adam Stockhausen to create this period in British history. Was there something in the research that you were looking at with Blitz that surprised you or that you came across and when you saw it, you went, “Well, I’ve never seen this before and I have to include this in the film.”
SM: Everything, everything, everything. Everything in this movie has not really been seen in a movie depicting the war before. Everything. Tell me something which you have seen. Everything, from the fire hose, understanding the mechanisms that the firemen had to the sort of apparatus they had to deal with, with the mechanism, the apparatus they had to deal with, and in a way how innate they were. The fact that the fire hoses were made out of canvas, they leaked the brass nozzles that they couldn’t control the water pressure. All the way through to the Cafe de Paris and people’s fingers being sort of cut off for jewelry and the Cafe de Paris before the explosion, with decadence. People are rations and people living The Life of Riley. Mickey Davis, this small gentleman who was one of the architects of the NHS, who basically created these shelters. An American journalist went to Mickey’s shelter, and she said this is the first time she’s ever seen democracy in actual action. To Ife, the warden and his speech, which absolutely is true. It was a guy called Itte Epion.
I mean, we could go on, I mean everything. But what was interesting about it for me doing the research, this wealth of this beautiful rich world, it was like, wow, I was diving into the world, this actually happened and I’ve never seen it. I think we know more about the Tudors in the UK than we know about the Blitz. So to bring it up because as a filmmaker, it’s exciting, my God, it’s dynamic. Let’s bring this up to and bring the women in the war factories, how they assemble a bomb. I mean, this is everything. So it’s not like anything you’ve seen before. And it’s not a case of, as my son would say, “flexing”. No, it’s just a case that the fact of the matter is that this is all, then you understand that there’s been a choice. And like I said, it’s almost like watching cowboys and Indian movies and you’re finding out the Native Americans aren’t the bad guys as they said. It’s important, and these are important stories, to correct the landscape. But first and foremost it’s about the story.
RM: Yeah, no, absolutely.
SM: It’s not about ticking boxes.
RM: No, not at all. It’s about showing what you found.
SM: No, I’m just making sure. It’s interesting because people always say that research is an enabler for the story. That’s about it.
RM: It helps guide the story forward.
SM: It’s an enabler, that’s all. Because it’s got to be because the basis of this picture is love first and foremost. This is not a formal picture. It’s a picture rich with emotion, which is very, very important. It’s not formal.
RM: No, I agree. Watching the film, you talked about Ife’s experience. You showcase obviously Georgia’s journey through this, and then of course there’s the moment with Ife and the family in the shelter and while there are still racial tensions, it’s war. He says, “We’re all in this together.” Could you talk about those social, racial dynamics and how you wanted to present them in war and outside of the war?
SM: This movie is not reactionary. It is a discovery. It’s very important. I’m not doing it because other people are doing different things. I’m doing it because of what I found. That’s very different. The fact that people like me and you have been left out to a certain extent within certain times of history is a choice, and it’s a choice of who’s behind the camera. That’s their choice. Fine, no problem. But I’m interested in what I found and putting it on the screen. So my film is not a reaction to what has been done before. My film, as I said, as I think I said it quite well before, it’s much more of a discovery than anything else. And that’s exciting. It’s exciting when you discover something because then you go, “Oh, look at this.” As a filmmaker, it becomes something. It’s food. It’s fuel.
Our differences can be put aside for sure. But also first and foremost, I was interested in making a thrilling, exciting, nail-biting, edge-of-your-chair movie. That’s what you want. Because again, to sort of have the situation of the whole idea of putting out their situation of say race as it were, that’s evident. But what’s more important is love. I mean, it’s a fact.
RM: You mentioned in the Q&A last night about the vital role that women played in the war and that you hadn’t really got to see in a movie like this; a movie on the homefront and their role in the war. Why was their part in this film so vital to tell in the overall story of Blitz?
SM: Because they were heroes of, they were sort of unsung heroes. I think that’s the thing. And Rita is an individual, she’s not just a mother. She is an individual. She’s a singer, amateur singer. She has her friends. She has discovered herself through an extraordinary situation, a situation she more likely would not have been in other than because we’re at war. And she has, again, a lot of women found themselves through the circumstance, found their full potential through the circumstance they were put in because they would’ve more likely been stayed as a domestic sort of women as it were.
But after the war, they didn’t want to go back. They discovered this power, they discovered this sort of independence. And the first thing will happen after the war is people voted Churchill out. I mean, he was a good war leader, but they didn’t want to go back to the status quo, didn’t want to go back to the class divide. A lot of people found their full potential during the war because people were put in extraordinary situations which they wouldn’t have been in, and they found themselves, and these women were one of them. And for me, in my picture, again, it had to be told, how could it not?
RM: I was surprised about the creation of the bombs, and how they were creating those. But it makes sense too because it was all that was left.
SM: Yeah, they were the biggest workforce. There was no one else. Yeah, most guys were shooting fire.
RM: You have these two stars in this film. And so could you talk about the process of finding Elliot (Heffernan) and forming George with him? And then also collaborating with him and Saoirse
(Ronan) in creating this bond within Blitz is so essential to the journey of the film?
SM: No, I think with Elliot it was just…when we discovered him, I got a tape of him actually, and I saw his face because there were other people who sent in auditions. I saw this one kid and he felt like he looked like he was pissed off, like he didn’t want to be there. But there was a stillness about him and there was a fascination with him in a sense, because he was magnetizing. He was like a solid movie star. Like I said, he’s like Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd or Valentino. There’s really kind of stillness in him, but because of the stillness, there’s the presence, incredibly big eyes. So immediately I brought him in and he worked with the acting coach Simon, can you please get his last name because I can’t remember. It’s Simon. And we worked with him. And then what happened was that he kind of evolved in that situation and I thought, “Okay, this guy’s got it.”
Then of course, Saoirse, who has, obviously, a great agent because somehow he got the bloody script. How’s that possible? Anyway, and then she said she was interested in the role. I was very chuffed by it, but again, I didn’t know. We spoke a lot on the phone, me and Saoirse spoke a lot about our mothers. And what was so beautiful about Saoirse is that she has a very close bond with her mother, almost like a friendship, again, as well as mother. And then one aspect of it was that I needed Saoirse to sing and I didn’t know if she could sing. And she told me at that time she could hold the tune. I thought, “My God, what does that mean?” And she was in Australia at the time. So we were doing all our calls through Zoom, and then what happened was I got a singing coach and I never forgot the call from the singing coach.
After a few days of her working with Saoirse, she said, “Not only can you sing, but it’s only going to get better.” So I was so relieved and so happy. So I offered Saoirse the role. Then at some point I got Saoirse and Elliot together and they were just… I think he was very shy. He was eight years old then and he had never done a movie before and Saoirse just took him under her wing and they just… A mutual kinship after that. And it was beautiful and it grew into a beautiful friendship and you could see that on the screen. It was really infectious, in fact.
RM: Another thing that I was taken aback by was the sound work and Hans’ s(Zimmer) score as well as also this is a very musical film in terms of the music surrounding the entire film, led by the original song from Nicholas Britell. But I wanted to ask you about working with your sound design team and creating the very effective sound of war that we see in the picture through George’s visions of war. As well as also working with Hans and Nicholas again.
SM: Yeah, well, the sound work we worked with was gorgeous. We worked for nearly two months on the sound. We worked in the Warner Brothers new space in Central London and it was Paul Cotterell and James Harrison. They did the sound. It was two months. It was amazing because I’m a sound person.
Because I grew up with radio. So British radio is hugely important. Wireless. The wireless. Even from my grandparents, the wireless. I remember being in the Amazon listening to the radio. I was in the Amazon, but when you see the Amazon on the TV, it is almost like a guy with a pen knife. When it’s on the radio, it’s a guy with a cutlass slashing through the bush.
So sound, I think often sound is way more important than actual images because Instinctively, we as audiences, we are people, we hear something and we know the weight of it. We can actually feel the scale of it through sound much more than images. It’s almost like your whole body sort of measures a certain thing through sound. It’s not just your image, it’s your whole body. So anyway, it’s very visual. So myself and James and Paul were underground in this amazing space working with the sound. It couldn’t be better.
I had Hans Zimmer and Nicholas Britell who were the same guys who worked in 12 Years a Slave in the same capacity. So I had a dynamic duo. Hans did the score and Nicholas did the on-screen music.
So, with Nick, okay, we talk about “Winter Coat.” I had this idea of, because my father left me his, when he died, I got his winter coat. With “Winter Coat,” I love the idea of someone who died and leaves you a coat and the idea of putting on a coat on, it’s like an embrace, it’s like a hug. It’s all over your body, the texture, the whole idea of absence but presence through the warmth of a coat. And I thought that could be an amazing song. My winter’s coat is yours. To project onto these women because all of those women in that factory that Saoirse, Rita, is singing to has a sense of someone who’s not there. And to sort of communicate a sense of presence through that, through the idea I thought could be amazing. Everybody has a keepsake of someone. And I just love the idea of this coat being an embrace from someone who’s not there.
RM: I mean it’s about relationships, I mean it could be about George’s father…
SM: For sure, for sure.
RM: …but it could also be about Rita missing her child.
SM: For sure, 110%. I mean that’s the thing about it. 110%. And I think with Nicholas we went to Abby Road to record that. And it was just beautiful. We are very quick, very spontaneous, me, Nick, we just went… Bang, bang, bang, it was done. And then another person added some lyrics to it too, but it was very quick because it was heartfelt. When things are heartfelt, there’s no pretense. There’s no pretense. Hans understood this story immediately because his mother was in London during the Blitz, she was evacuated to London in the Blitz, but she lived, I think, in Mayfair. Five years after the war finished, she went immediately back to Germany, where she met Hans’s father. Unfortunately, when Hans was born five years later, his father died and he was put off the boarding school. So his separation already was very… He understood that. And he has a very big image of his mother on his iPad. And again, he understood it.
This is an exclusive for you. I said, “Hans, by doing this movie, you understand your mother better.” I think at first I thought he was a bit pissed off… Not pissed off but a bit sort of irritated by what I said. But while doing the score for the movie, he understood what I said. He said, “Steve, I understand what you mean by that.” I sat shoulder to shoulder with Hans, writing the score, every single note. And it was immediate and it was instinctual and it was… He went there. What’s interesting about Hans Zimmer? He’s Hans fucking Zimmer, right? No, seriously, he’s Hans fucking Zimmer. And the thing with Hans Zimmer is that when he was doing the work, he was scared of doing the score. He was scared doing the score because he was unsure if you saw the vulnerability, saw the humanity of him. But I said, “Man, you’re Hans Zimmer.” But that was so beautiful of Hans because he brought it to the surface, a lot of things, which was maybe there, dormant, of course, in his life, which he could bring out for the first time in a spontaneous way or in a bated way. I was sitting right next to him shoulder to shoulder. I was sitting right next to him.
RM: I want to circle back to something visual in the film; the flowers in George dreams, but then also it’s the motif at the end of the film.
SM: Yes, yes, yes, at the beginning of the picture.
RM: Would you walk me through where that imagery came from? Those flowers are like a sense of comfort for George. It’s also the only shots, I believe, in the film that are in black and white photography. But there’s also a bit of static there as well that also you talk about radio. There seems to be a lot of beauty and safety in those shot selections.
SM: I was interested in animation during the first World War. There were a lot of avant-garde artists who were trying to deal with the second World War through animation. And I was just trying to focus on the abstraction. And I was interested in the abstraction in war. And I was doing a lot of research and that was looking into that. And I came across this film made by Man Ray…I forgot the title, give me a second … Emak Bakra from 1926…stupid man, Steve McQueen.
So what the images are of multiple things, the first image actually are X-rays of rock crystals. What we have in the beginning of the film when we first come is the service of the film, you don’t know what it is that’s very abstract, but you find out what it’s later is obviously a plane which are hovering low over the sea, avoiding the radar. And then obviously after that gets fragments of that, that is X-ray images of salt crystals. Then they cut into daisies. What I loved about the rock, because for me it amplified the bottom of the sea, but also the flint. We gained from the flint of the fire to the low craft of the plane, then daisies. For me, the daisies represented a nostalgia of how things were and how things could be.
That’s what it was. Obviously, it’s more than the positive and it’s almost to make it home in a way it’s, but what wasn’t obviously going on now. So it was a want. It was a want. It’s similar to, again, you could think of “Mercy Mercy Me” by Marvin Gay or “Imagine” by John Lennon. For me, the message was a want. And again, when we go, this is how it could be. Because we had that chaos and we went to the flowers, the daisies. So that’s why I was doing this, looking to abstraction within people trying to understand beauty in chaos. It was surrealist. People were trying to make sense of nonsense through abstraction and that’s what these answers were doing.
RM: Lastly, you talked about the privilege of making a movie like this. I was listening to the conversation at the New York Film Fest. You mentioned Blitz as a tool to help us bring us back together from what you said, because we’ve “lost our marbles.” And how do you think your film and other films like this can restore our hope in such chaotic, modern times?
SM: Well, I mean that’s the thing about it. I mean the film, obviously it’s about 1940, but it could be seen as if it’s 2024 because the whole world’s on fire from Sudan, Ukraine, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, etc, etc. It just keeps on going on. But not to say that it wouldn’t have been of relevance or value at any other time, but it seems like now it seems it’s been hugely heightened.
Listen, as a filmmaker, I feel privileged that this film comes out of this time, unfortunately, because the world is the way it is. Again, it’s that basic, as children, you don’t learn how to heat. In fact, if anything you’re encouraged to love, and again, that might sound a bit soft, but it’s the truth. And I think, sometimes, the volume of truth needs to be turned up. And this, as much as I can do as an artist, what happens otherwise other than that I can’t do anything about. But other than as artists, all of us have a responsibility to turn up the volume on love, because that’s what we got, that’s what we all got.
RM: Do you feel like that should be in more films or in more art?
SM: Listen, listen. I’m not interested in a message. I’m interested in truth. And the truth could be ugly, the truth could be whatever it could be. It is about looking at ourselves rather than having a situation where we are looking away from ourselves. And sometimes looking at ourselves in the mirror, it’s not particularly attractive, but it’s vital for us to sort of understand where we are and where we need to go. As an artist, this is the least one can do. And I feel very fortunate that this film has come out at this time because it feels urgent. It feels very urgent.
RM: Thank you for your time, sir.
SM: Pleasure. Thank you. Genius questions.
Blitz is currently playing in select theaters and will be available on AppleTV+ November 22.
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