Steve McQueen is touched by my concern. “Lord help us, you have to be frightened when a journalist is scared for you!” The idea makes him smile. And no, the acclaimed artist and filmmaker does not seem in obvious danger, sipping coffee in London’s Soho. He is here in good spirits with a new movie to discuss: Blitz, a portrait of the city wracked by the 1940-41 Nazi bombing campaign. It is breathtaking cinema: urgent even for a director whose work so often meets the moment, and in some ways, his most personal film.
It also takes on enough sacred cows that, eventually, McQueen does admit a certain sense of risk. “But if risk comes with the truth, let it be a risk.”
Anyone who knows the UK will know too the role of the Blitz in the national psyche: a triumph of mass endurance in the face of the abyss. Now 55, McQueen recalls encountering that cultural memory as a child in 1970s London, by now pared down to core images. “Churchill’s cigar. St Paul’s still standing. Smiling faces sheltering on Tube platforms.” Soon, he also heard of the “Blitz spirit”, the phrase with which later Britons would be urged by press and politicians to cope with crisis as their forebears did: chipper in the rubble, uncomplainingly united.
McQueen tells a subtly different story. His film stars Saoirse Ronan as Rita, an east London mother whose mixed race young son George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan) is evacuated but takes flight back to the capital. In the drama that follows, there is no lack of sacrifice. But the picture is also complicated by panic, anger, cynicism and high-handed, even inhumane authority. On screen, terrified Londoners have to force their way into Stepney Green station with bombs about to fall — locked out on official orders.
“What is almost unknown now is that, at first, people weren’t allowed to shelter in the Underground,” McQueen says. “It was forbidden. And that came from the top of government.”
Blitz, then, is radical filmmaking: a stirring, mainstream war movie that also sets a question mark against a patriotic totem. Some audiences may bristle. “What we take as national history is often selective memory,” McQueen says. “I understand that. People want to emphasise victory. But if you neglect the whole story, you create an ongoing problem.”
That problem, he says, isn’t political as much as psychological: a vast well of personal trauma buried under an upbeat rewriting of the past. “Imagine what people went through, and how much of their experience they then found was unwelcome.”
McQueen arrived at Blitz from various starting points. Earlier this year, he released Occupied City, the large-canvas documentary about another European city in wartime, Amsterdam, made with his filmmaker wife, Bianca Stigter. The director has lived in the Dutch capital since 1996. Today he says that seeing unbombed canal houses first made him ask what, by contrast, had happened in the city he’d just left.
Then, in 2003, he travelled to Basra, Iraq, tasked by the Imperial War Museum with producing art to represent the conflict. (The result would be his 2007 artwork “Queen and Country”.) Embedded with British troops, he was struck by what he calls a perversity. “There was such camaraderie. But it only existed through war.”
The final puzzle piece was Small Axe, McQueen’s groundbreaking 2020 film series about the Caribbean community in London. While researching, he found a photograph of a Black evacuee with an oversized suitcase. “That was my in.” Once Small Axe was made, a new story took shape: a child’s-eye view of the London Blitz.
McQueen had already made cinema from archival history: 12 Years a Slave, whose 2014 Best Picture Oscar was then the first won by a Black director, was based on records of American slavery. Now, aware of potential pushback and wanting his research “tight”, he worked with Joshua Levine, the British historian who advised on Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.
McQueen found a wealth of detail airbrushed from popular memory: not just formal hostility to Underground shelters, but the grassroots figures who did keep ordinary Londoners safe, and the significant Jewish, Chinese and Black communities in the bomb-barraged streets of Soho and Covent Garden.
There was ghoulish horror too. The film’s most unnerving sequence takes place in the splendid Café de Paris, where a 1941 bombing saw looters descend to steal jewellery from the dead.
“I’m not trying to shame us. There was heroism everywhere in the Blitz, when Britain really was alone fighting Hitler. But this was war. And London was also home to poverty, and criminality.” McQueen says he had no agenda to destroy the myths lurking in the British self-image. “I never set out to discredit anything. I just wanted to tell the truth — a story about what was, rather than what we would like to have been. Reality is healthier.”
That much has not always been a given in 80 years of British films about the second world war. Ronan’s Rita takes dual roles as the mother of an evacuated child and a munitions worker in a factory filled with former housewives. I tell McQueen it feels like Blitz has reached into the background of an older British war film, and led the character out to the front of the story. “And in that other movie, she’d have been nagging!” he exclaims.
Instead, she is also a crackerjack singer in a musical family. Her pianist father is played by Paul Weller in the veteran musician’s first acting role. (“Paul was not convinced at all,” McQueen smiles, although his weathered presence bears out the director’s instinct that he’d fit the movie perfectly.)
None of this was accidental. In his research, McQueen found a recurring theme and silver lining. “Music was the refuge! Even in the Blitz, it could perfume a house with joy, and give people courage. So I wanted it everywhere.”
He even co-wrote a song for the soundtrack, “Winter Coat”. The screenplay was his alone — his first without a co-writer. The more McQueen talks about Blitz, the greater the sense of a war story touched by his own biography. The whole film, he says, hinges on young George fleeing the train meant to carry him from London. “He escapes the narrative set for him. Like my narrative was set for me.”
McQueen has spoken before of school as a traumatic crossroads: realising he was being prepared for a life in manual labour before his artistic talent was recognised. If his route to Blitz took in Amsterdam and Basra, he says he knows now it also began in childhood, and the playgrounds of 1970s west London. “Run by hippies, in these old bombed-out corners. Hilarious, health-and-safety-wise.” Then he’d walk home past more ghosts of wartime destruction: streets where single new houses sat unexplained in older terraces.
A true blockbuster, Blitz is now physically the biggest film of his career. “I wanted to make a British epic,” he says. That vision was realised with the might of backers Apple. When I ask if he felt pressure, he outright twinkles. “It was easy. Like driving a Porsche. Everything worked. My desk in the production office didn’t even wobble.”
Between that scale and the connection to so many personal landmarks, it feels as if McQueen has been moving towards Blitz his whole life. “That’s not for me to say. Maybe that’s for you to write.” But yes, he says, London has come to dominate his imagination. Even after so long in Amsterdam, he says he doesn’t think he ever really left. “And when you get to the age I am, you look back at the place that made you.”
The result has been a body of recent work that makes a stunning mosaic of an under-seen London. The secret histories of Small Axe segue into the hidden truths of Blitz, whose wartime bombsites became council housing like the tragic Grenfell Tower, subject of McQueen’s stark 2023 gallery film “Grenfell”. The director himself links Blitz to “Year 3”, the maximalist art project in which he took class photographs in two-thirds of the city’s primary schools. “That’s the closest thing for me. Because it says ‘This is the reality of London.’”
But he also sees the realities of his new film stretch beyond his hometown. However fixed in British memories, the Blitz is in the past. In the Middle East and Ukraine, more bombs lay waste to life each day. “So the need you feel with Blitz for the violence to stop is a need you feel now too. You watch the film in 2024, and ask again — how can it stop?”
Blitz is released on November 1
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