Breaking Baz: Steve McQueen’s ‘Blitz’ Recreates Bombing Raids On London As Seen Through The Eyes Of Brave 9-Year-Old Boy

EXCLUSIVE: It was the faded monochrome photograph of a small Black boy, both hands gripping a valise, as he leaves London with a party of other school-age evacuees, that caught Steve McQueen’s eye while he was researching his Small Axe film anthology. 

“I just wanted to know who he was … what was his story?” the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave filmmaker recalls thinking when Deadline met up with him to talk about his thrilling, deeply personal new movie Blitz. It’s set in 1940 wartime London, when Hitler’s Luftwaffe unloaded its payloads and pounded the city seemingly nonstop for eight months.

The movie, a Working Title production for Apple, will have its world premiere October 9 as opening-night film of the BFI London Film Festival at the Southbank Centre.

The following night, October 10, it’s the New York Film Festival’s closing-night feature. Blitz then will debut November 1 in select cinemas before premiering globally on Apple TV+ on November 22.

Blitz, which re-creates London at the height of the German blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” eschews the Dickie Attenborough school of Britain’s World War II films — the ones stuffed with stiff-upper-lip, pasty-faced types parading about in starched white shirts and showing off their military regalia.

McQueen wasn’t having any of what he calls “cardboard cutout” Brits in Blitz, which he researched thoroughly. Many of the film’s characters — air-raid wardens, musicians and folk who managed the bomb shelters, especially ones located deep in the tunnels of London Underground stations — are based on real people.

A few were much like, in spirit at least, some of the soldiers McQueen met when he was sent by the Imperial War Museum to Iraq during the 2003 Middle East conflict to serve as Official War Artist. He recalls being embedded with British forces in Basra and Baghdad and hearing all those voices and listening to these regional accents from Glasgow to Newcastle to Sheffield, Somerset and Swansea, he says. “Having conversations about their kit and buying stuff off the Americans,” he laughs. 

It was the first time, he believes, “that I felt a sense of nationalism. I’d never had that feeling at all — I’m not interested — but for the first time I had a sense of camaraderie, of nationalism. But it was the first time I’ve had that feeling because we were together. We were from all over.”

His voice drops. “And, unfortunately, that sense of unity came from war.”

The power of that photo of the young lad prompted McQueen to combine two strands of thought: war somehow sparked community unity, “a togetherness,” coupled with the perspective of a boy in war on the other.

He asks me to think of a child being around parents when they row violently. “It’s the worst thing in the world that can ever happen to a child,” he says. “So imagine a small child in war? It becomes three times as amplified.”

For Blitz’s purposes, that child is called George, and he’s played with guts and gumption by Elliott Heffernan, a total newcomer. And he looks just like the kid in the photograph that had taken McQueen’s breath away.

“We have made this world that this child has to live through; it’s a world we’ve made one way or another,” McQueen laments.

Rita, the boy’s mother (played with heart and gritty determination by Saoirse Ronan) raises him along with her dad (a fine Paul Weller) in a terrace house they all share in East London. The war is perceived through Rita’s eyes as well.

Elliott was 9 when filming began two years ago, “He was 8 when he auditioned,” says McQueen. “So he was a little boy, and he auditioned because he’d never done acting before. As soon as I saw him, I thought, ‘Oh, he is the truth!’ He wasn’t going to pretend to be a child. He was a child. So when you present him with things, he reacted accordingly, and that’s why the other actors had to go up the two or three notches to get on his level. Because for him, it was reality. It wasn’t pretend.”

The filmmaker had a language coach and a movement director come in to adjust their speech patterns to match the period. “Elliott and the other child actors were playing children who’d never seen a mobile phone or been on the internet, so we had to shape their body language. They had to learn how to hold a cup of tea and not a mobile.”

Voice coaches worked with the cast, several of them young children, on their vocals; obviously modern-day slang was out. McQueen says authenticity was paramount.

When production designer Adam Stockhausen (The French Dispatch, McQueen’s Widows) had to create crumbling bomb sites, McQueen had him “look for some kind of authenticity” in the stone and bricks used.

Costume designer Jacqueline Durran (Barbie) came and talked to the cast about the clothes they’d be wearing and how to wear them.

The movement director also coached them to “understand the threat — the threat that at any moment, at any time, you might not be here. So with that, urgency affected their performance too,” McQueen adds.

The filmmaker had to talk to Elliott about war. “I think it’s surreal,” he says. 

“To normalize the atrocities of war is strange, isn’t it? And then we have to talk to a prepubescent child about what the world is. It’s hard. How do we normalize nonsense?” he demands, his voice rising as he bangs the table in the back booth of the Dean Street Cafe in Soho.

He asks again: “How do we normalize the extremes of reality?”

How Elliott’s George responds to these realities is what the movie’s about, says McQueen.

He says that what the young actor does in the movie is “extraordinary,” a view that I share. He’s full of beans and derring-do is Master Elliott Heffernan. “He leaps off a train and risks his life in other ways.,” McQueen marvels.

McQueen’s clearly proud of the lad. “I mean, to some extent he carries this movie. And I think what’s important about George is that through him you see yourself.”   

Blitz triggered a lot of memories for me, having worked in the East End in the mid-1970s, covering a patch for a local newspaper that stretched from Bethnal Green across to Stepney, Poplar, Bow and the Docks. The area back then still was scarred from bomb damage. And people remembered, but they weren’t all prepared to talk about it.

They had endured unbelievably harsh hardships yet they still made time. A few shared with me having a jolly good knees-up on a Saturday night to dance their cares away, back in the day. Bombs and sirens be damned.

I happen to now live just off of the Mile End Road in Bow, part of where the film’s set. In 1940, a bomb had dropped on the garden square where our home is, and neighboring streets on three sides took direct hits. A parachute mine blew up properties a hop and a skip away. This movie’s in my postcode.   

Also my foster mother used to talk of how many of the neighboring women tackled various jobs that their menfolk, many now fighting overseas, used to do. They got up to all sorts of mischief with the men in foreign uniforms that congregated at London hotspots for a laugh and a shout. The refrain was “We’re all going to die tomorrow.” “They had to live now,” McQueen notes.

But they knew they had to do their bit to help other Londoners, particularly marshaling the air-raid shelters; soon people with leadership skills emerged.

J.B. Priestley (An Inspector Calls), the playwright and screenwriter, understood that. He was impressed with an East Ender by the name of Mickey Davies, who features in the film. He’s portrayed by Leigh Gill (the Joker films, Game of Thrones). 

Davies was a pint-sized local optician and community organizer known as Mickey Midget. He encouraged shelterers to bring about order and cleanliness in the underground shelters in Spitalfields and thereabouts. Priestley wrote how men and women like Davies “with a gift for leadership now turn up in expected places.” 

Britain was being “bombed and burned into democracy,” Priestley claimed.

Davies’ social health care endeavors were an early sense of what parts of the coming National Health Service would look like. Locals long have wanted to have a statue or some other memorial by which to honor Davies’ legacy. The scheme was scotched during Boris Johnson’s time as London mayor.

McQueen’s movie picks up the spirit he felt in while stationed in Iraq. “The Blitz brought people together in a way that it had never happened before. Extraordinary circumstances brought these people together. I mean, women were liberated, sexually liberated, liberated within,” McQueen says, pointing to evidence in a trove of scholarly studies, including Joshua Levine’s insightful The Secret History of the Blitz.

Levine collaborated with McQueen on Blitz. One real-life character mentioned in the book was E.I. Ekpenyon, a law student from Nigeria who became an air-raid warden in Marylebone.

His name and story is fictionalized in Blitz. He’s still an air-raid warden, but he’s called Ife, translated from the Ibo language to mean “love.” And Love is played with uncommon grace by Benjamin Clémentine (Dune: Part One, The Morning Show).

While on his almost Dickensian journey back home to his mum and his grandad from evacuation in the countryside, Goerge he encounters all manner of chancers and scallywags, but there are a few friendly faces; Ife’s one of them.

There’s a marvelous moment when Ife instructs George about race. McQueen says it’s a case of “how do you communicate to a 9-year-old who you are and what you are and where you come from, especially a Black child,” who feels ashamed of who he is because he’s suffered racial abuse of a kind he’s unable to comprehend.

“He’s called a Black and everyone around him isn’t Black. It’s a hard one for him.Then he discovers it for himself through Ife,” McQueen says

What has happened to George is that “he’s had an understanding of the world through his journey, his physical journey,” the filmmaker adds. “That’s what I wanted to do. I wasn’t trying to tick boxes, I was just trying to bring this child through London as it was then.”

It’s for audiences to discover what tumultuous events George endures. One huge set piece depicting a terrifying event is based on a real disaster that occurred in the depths of a London Underground tube station, leaving 34 dead.

McQueen tells me his movie “is about cinema. It’s about how to be enthralled, to be entertained. It’s not necessarily there to educate,” he says. If you want that, ”then read a book.”

He calls Blitz a fairy tale, “and a very dark one.”

It’s “the Brothers Grimm. And that’s the journey that George goes on.”

And with the men away at war, the women left behind went about smashing through a few societal ceilings. “The Blitz was the beginning of sexual liberation. The beginning of women’s liberation in the Blitz, not the ’60s,” McQueen argues. “It was definitely the Blitz, although it was evident in the 1930s too. The freedoms that we are living with now is directly from the Blitz. In a way, it’s not given credit, he contends, saying, “I mean, from horrendous circumstances comes something very beautiful.”

The Blitz “brought people together in a way that they never had done before,” and that’s why the British voted Winston Churchill out and Clement Attlee in to replace the wartime leader as Prime Minister.

“They were not going to be subservient to anybody,” says McQueen.

The director wanted to put women “in the situation of war” rather than “just crying or being on a mattress for men.”

Ronan’s Rita works with other women making bombs for the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command to drop on Nazi targets. 

The irony’s not lost on McQueen, who laughs and calls Rita making devices to halt London’s destruction as “this lunacy of war.”

However, the newfound “freedom” gives Rita the spine to speak up for herself against the shallow, misogynistic supervisors who leer at her and attempt to put her in her place.

Ronan’s scenes with Elliott are touching. The actors, including Weller, really bonded, says McQueen. A moment that sticks out for him came when Ronan and Elliott were playing between takes and he saw her remove a stray eyelash from the boy’s eye and then blows on it to make a wish.

“That happened spontaneously, and I say: “Oh, no, no, whoa. Please do that again.” That little moment is in the film, and that was through them being so natural together, he tells me.

“It was chemistry. Beautiful,” he says. “And as an artist, as a director, you look for that.”

For McQueen, ”there’s no better actress than“ than Saoirse Ronan. “She’s like Bette Davis, she’s that good. I mean, she’s interesting, she’s fascinating; she makes the ordinary extraordinary, the arbitrary fascinating.”

They all, Weller too, looked out for each other, “they were like a family,” says McQueen.

He personally chose Weller because the musician reminded him of an image he once saw of Paul McCartney with his father. There was a piano in the corner of the photograph. “For the film, I love the idea that there’s a piano in the living room and that people come around, and as a community come together through song.”

The first thing they do when local kids hurl racial abuse at George is they sing “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and somehow, McQueen adds, “that song makes everything a little bit better.”

Weller’s good playing the authentic Londoner that he most definitely is. When George is headed to the countryside, his grandpa tells him to be brave and to stand up to bullies. 

Singing and dancing was important for camaraderie “to sort of get over the sunny side of the street, all that kind of business,” says McQueen.

Soho’s clubland boasted three venues that were known as Black clubs. The old Shim-Sham, for one, contracted Black musicians.

On the Piccadilly side of the street, Ghanaian-born bandleader Ken “Snakehips” Johnson and his big band were playing the Café de Paris. Revelers liked it because, situated underground in Piccadilly, it was deemed safe — when two bombs entered the club down a ventilation shaft. 

We experience these horrors through George’s eyes. No child should see such things. But this is wartime. “By having George see this, how can he make sense of it? And he’s not having it,” says McQueen.

He says the thing he loves about youth is that they have the power to give a definitive yes or no, good or bad, while “we, at a certain point in our lives, we end up compromising” — although he insists that, as an artist, he doesn’t have to compromise. ”I will not take second best as an artist. It’s good or bad, that’s how it is,” he thunders.

McQueen and his wife, producer and cultural scholar Bianca Stigter, made the acclaimed documentary Occupied City in Amsterdam, where they reside, and that was helpful when it came to making Blitz because in mainland Europe “those places were occupied. The war is very much in the foreground there.”

Conversely, in the UK it really isn’t, he says. “It’s because we weren’t occupied, so I had to bring that sort of psyche from the Netherlands to over here and to be very sensitive to it here. “

For research, he’d walk around London and study the physicality of the streets and look for the telltale signs of modern structures inserted between period buildings. “The physical evidence of the Blitz is actually here, not just the emotional and social. Look,” he implores, “open your eyes. So many people could do a double take walking around the city once they’ve seen this picture.”

McQueen’s clearly sickened by war, but he’s interested “in the evidence of things not seen.”

He returns to the subject often because he believes, as do I, that art gives us permission to discuss the unimaginable.

Blitz, with its thrilling, exciting, sometimes emotional heart-tugging elements, feels way more accessible than his acclaimed dramas 12 Years a Slave, Shame and Hunger.

“I wanted to make a picture which could reach all kinds of people. It’s important, in some ways, not to dumb down anything and to embrace every aspect of society — feature films can do that. And I’m interested in cinema,” he says. “It’s like music, it can connect to everybody.”

First time I saw Blitz was back in June. McQueen screened the film for me on a big screen in one of the screening rooms in Warner Bros’ cavernous post-production complex that recently opened in Soho. The first image startled me. There were firefighters tackling a blaze in the aftermath of a bombing raid. The hose kept jerking as if it were alive. It was uncontrollable.

McQueen explains that the hoses were made of canvas  and they leaked. Equipment back then was “terrible.”

When he wrote the script, he says, he was thinking “of someone fighting a fire-breathing dragon with a garden hose. That’s what it was.”

I saw Blitz again a few weeks later over at Apple’s London headquarters in Battersea on the south side of the Thames, and even though the film was beamed onto a much smaller screen, that scene still captivates, as do many others.

Next for McQueen is a project with Amazon. Which he can’t talk about. And he wants to set anther film in London. “I want to use London the way Scorsese uses New York.”