It was a single photograph that started Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen on the journey to make “Blitz.” As a Londoner, the German bombing raids on the city during World War II are never all that far from his mind. Reminders of it are everywhere.
But the spark of inspiration came from an image of a small boy on a train platform with a large suitcase. Stories inspired by the evacuation are not rare, but this child was Black. Who was he, McQueen wondered, and what was his story?
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The film, in theaters Friday and streaming on Apple TV+ on Nov. 22, tells the tale of George, a 9-year-old biracial child in East London whose life with his mother, Rita ( Saoirse Ronan ), and grandfather is upended by the war. Like many children at the time, he’s put on a train to the countryside for his safety. But he hops off and starts a long, dangerous journey back to his mom, encountering all sorts of people and situations that paint a revelatory and emotional picture of that moment.
SEARCHING FOR GEORGE AND FINDING A STAR
When McQueen finished the screenplay, he thought to himself: “Not bad.” Then he started to worry: Does George exist? Is there a person out there who can play this role? Through an open casting call they found Elliott Heffernan, a 9-year-old living just outside of London whose only experience was a school play. He was the genie in “Aladdin.”
“There was a stillness about him, a real silent movie star quality,” McQueen said. “You wanted to know what he was thinking, and you leant in. That’s a movie star quality: A presence in his absence.”
Elliott is now 11. When he was cast, he’d not yet heard about the evacuation and imagined that a film set would be made up of “about 100 people.” But he soon found his footing, cycling in and out of the little vignettes along the way of George’s odyssey with stunts, slaps and all. Elliott, for his part, preferred the days with stunts.
“It’s just more exciting,” Elliott said.
As his on-screen mother and co-star, Ronan, who remembers well the strange experience of being a child on a movie set, took him under her wing. Now, not only is he getting raves for his performance, he’s already booked another film (though he can’t talk about that yet). Another bonus: He’s fully impressed his teachers with his WWII knowledge.
BUT CAN SHE SING?
Ronan told her agent she wanted to take a break after “The Outrun,” with one caveat: Steve McQueen. “He was like, ‘well, on that…,’” Ronan laughed.
“I was really excited by the idea that the love story that was going to exist in this kind of wartime epic would be a child and his mother,” Ronan said. “It was a story set during the Second World War that was going to stay on the ground. It was going to focus on the communities left at home and the ongoing war that they were facing every day that they stepped outside their front door.”
But McQueen needed a singer, and Ronan was an unknown quantity. They enlisted a vocal coach to visit her on a set where she was filming in Australia.
“I’ll never forget, I got a call saying, ‘Steve, she can not only sing, but it’s only going to get better,’” McQueen said. “I was very happy to call her back and say, ‘you got it.’”
Both Ronan and Elliott would get to sing alongside Paul Weller, the English rock star of the Jam and Style Council, in his first acting role as George’s kind grandfather. Rita also gets a solo showstopper in the original song “Winter Coat,” written by Nicholas Britell and Taura Stinson and inspired by McQueen’s own late father. She performs it during a live radio broadcast at the munitions factory where she works.
THE BACKBONE OF THE WAR
Showing that munitions factory was important to “Blitz.” In war movies, women are not often front and center. When they are, McQueen said, it’s a crying wife, or girlfriend, someone offering a cup of tea. This, he knew, was not the reality.
“Women (were) the emotional and physical backbone of the war," he said. "They were dealing with their aging parents. They were dealing with evacuating the children. And then they were going off to a munitions factory to make missiles and aircraft hangars to make planes."
USING THE CONVENTIONAL TO SHOW THE UNCONVENTIONAL
Some critics have called “Blitz” McQueen’s most conventional, or traditional, movie. This, he thinks, is missing the point.
“There’s classical tropes, there’s classical situation. For lack of a better word, it’s a Brothers Grimm fairy tale to some extent,” he said. “But what it is showing is totally revolutionary. It’s using the conventional to show the unconventional.”
This means taking audiences inside place they’ve never been: The tube station at Stepney Green where East London residents took shelter from the bombs; the munitions factory; the ritzy Café de Paris, where another class of Londoners enjoy oysters and champagne to the music from the house band playing “Oh Johnny” as the bombs fall; and the tube shelter where a flood killed 66 people.
“Blitz” also introduces audiences to people they’ve likely not heard of: Mickey Davies (played by Leigh Gill), a man known as “Mickey the Midget” who turned the Spitalfields Fruit and Wool Exchange into a shelter; and Ife (Benjamin Clémentine), a Nigerian air-raid warden who bonds with George, who was also inspired by a real person.
Everything in “Blitz” was drawn from historical fact. And most of it is seen through the eyes of a Black child. George, McQueen said, is not Oliver Twist.
“It’s like comparing me to Prince Harry,” McQueen said. “Like, really? But that’s to do with something else. That’s whatever that is. But the reality is I’m interested in images and stories that haven’t been told before.”
SEEING LONDON DIFFERENTLY
Ronan doesn’t live all that far from East London and is often reminded of the past in the banal every day. The bougie park where everyone walks their dogs? That’s only there because the rows of houses were destroyed, she said. But like everyone, she came out of “Blitz” with an even greater appreciation for her adopted community and neighbors, some of whom have lived in their homes their whole life.
“There’s a real commitment to the place,” she said. “Knowing that that still exists in London in small pockets means you’re sort of there to honor someone’s story.”
For McQueen, it was an important experience getting to know, and tell stories that we haven’t yet heard, much as he did with Solomon Northup in the Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave.”
“The Blitz is something we put a lot of our national identity on, you know, the Blitz spirit and who we are and whatnot, our finest hour and all that business,” he said. “What was interesting to me was illuminating the who were missing from the conversation. When I look at London now, I feel very proud. I feel very proud of all these people’s contributions and of the film: That we allowed people to see themselves.”
GOING FOR THE HEART
McQueen doesn’t lose sleep over the big set pieces: The flood, the fire, the Café de Paris destruction. But he does worry about the emotion of it.
“Cinema is about the heart,” he said. “What gave me sleepless nights was creating the love and that the people felt it and it was palpable in the family…This movie at the end of the day, is about love. L-O-V-E.”
Film festival audiences are responding as he hoped. Soon, everyone else will get the chance to go on this journey with George.
“It’s been getting a very visceral response from people,” McQueen said. “I think in London and New York, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It’s what cinema can do and that’s what I wanted. It’s as much about the audience: You can see yourself through a child’s eyes.”