It was a picture that started Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen’s journey of making “The Blitz.” As a Londoner, the German bombing of the city during World War II was never far from his mind. Reminders of this are everywhere.
But the spark of inspiration came from the image of a little boy standing with a large suitcase on a train platform. Exodus-inspired stories aren’t rare, but this kid was black. McQueen wondered who he was and what his story was.
The film, out in theaters on Friday and streaming on Apple TV on November 22, tells the story of George, a 9-year-old biracial boy in East London whose life is thrown into disarray by a war with his mother, Rita, and grandfather. Like many children of that time, for her safety she was put on a train headed to the countryside. But he takes off and begins a long, dangerous journey back to his mother, encountering all kinds of people and situations that paint a revelatory and emotional picture of that moment.
When McQueen finished the script, he thought to himself: “Not bad.” Then she began to worry: Does George exist? Is there anyone out there who can play this role? Through an open casting call they found Elliot Heffernan, a 9-year-old from just outside London whose only experience was a school play. He was the Genie in “Aladdin”.
McQueen said, “There was a stillness about him, a real silent movie star quality.” “You wanted to know what he was thinking, and you agreed. That’s the quality of a movie star: a presence in his absence.”
Elliot is now 11 years old. When she was cast, she had not heard of the evacuation and imagined that a film set would be made up of “about 100 people”. But he soon held his own, cycling in and out of small scenes along the way on George’s odyssey, with stunts, slapstick and everything in between. Elliott, for his part, preferred stunt days.
“This is even more exciting,” Elliott said.
As his on-screen mother and co-star, Ronan, who well remembers the strange experience of being a child on a film set, took him under her wing. Now, not only is he getting appreciation for his performance, but he has already booked another film. Another bonus: He’s totally impressed his teachers with his knowledge of World War II.
Ronan told her agent that she wanted to take a break after “The Outrun” with one caveat: Steve McQueen. “He was like, ‘Okay, on that…'” Ronan laughed.
Ronan said, “I was really excited by the idea that the love story that would exist in this kind of wartime epic would be that of a child and his mother.” “It was a story set during World War II that was going to stay grounded. It was supposed to focus on the communities left behind at home and the ongoing war they were facing every day when they stepped out their front doors.
But McQueen needed a singer, and Ronan was an unknown number. She hired a singing coach to visit her on the set where she was shooting the film in Australia.
McQueen said, “I’ll never forget, I got a call saying, ‘Steve, not only can she sing, but she’s going to get even better.’ “I was so happy to call him back and say, ‘You got it.'”
Both Ronan and Elliot will get the chance to sing with English rock star Paul Weller of the Jam and Style Council, in his first acting role as George’s kindly grandfather. Rita also gets a showstopper solo, “Winter Coat,” an original song written by Nicholas Britell and Taura Stinson and inspired by McQueen’s own late father. She demonstrates this during a live radio broadcast at the munitions factory where she works.
Showing that the munitions factory was vital to the “Blitz”. Women are not often front and center in war films. When they happen, McQueen said, it’s a crying wife, or girlfriend, someone offering a cup of tea. He knew, this is not reality.
“Women are the emotional and physical backbone of the war,” he said, adding, “They were working alongside their aging parents. They were working on evacuating the children. And then they were going to munitions factories to make missiles and aircraft hangars to make planes.”
Some critics have called “Blitz” McQueen’s most conventional, or conventional, film. He believes this is missing the point.
“There are classical tropes, there are classical situations. For lack of a better word, it’s somewhat of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale,” he said. “But what it’s showing is completely revolutionary. It’s using the traditional to show the unconventional.”
It’s meant to take audiences somewhere they’ve never been before: Stepney Green’s tube station where East London residents took refuge from the bombs; Munitions Factory; the stately Café de Paris, where another class of Londoners enjoys oysters and champagne to the music of the house band playing “Oh Johnny” as the bombs fall; and tube shelter where flooding killed 66 people.
“Blitz” also introduces viewers to someone they probably haven’t heard of: Mickey Davis, a man known as “Mickey the Midget”, who turned the Spitalfields Fruit and Wool Exchange into a shelter ; and Ife, a Nigerian air-raid warden who has a relationship with George, who was inspired by a real person.
Everything in “Blitz” was taken from historical fact. And much 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 it has to do with something else. It is whatever it is. But the reality is that I’m interested in images and stories that haven’t been told before.”
Ronan lives not far from East London and is often reminded of the past every day. That bougie park where everyone walks their dogs? This happened only because rows of houses were destroyed, he said. But like everyone else, she came out of the “Blitz” with an even greater appreciation for her adopted community and neighbors, some of whom have spent their entire lives in their homes.
“There’s a real commitment to this place,” he said. “Knowing that he still exists in small parts in London means you’re there to honor someone’s story.”
For McQueen, it was an important experience to learn and tell stories we haven’t heard yet, as he did with Solomon Northup in the Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave.”
“The Blitz is something that we base our national identity on, you know, the Blitz spirit and who we are and what we are not, our best times and all that business,” he said. “What was interesting to me was to highlight people who were missing from the conversation. Now when I look at London I feel very proud. I feel very proud of the contributions of all these people and of the film: that we allowed people to see themselves.
McQueen doesn’t sleep on big set pieces: the flood, the fire, the Café de Paris destruction. But he worries about its sentiment.
“Cinema is about the heart,” he said. “The thing that gave me sleepless nights was creating love and people felt it and it was evident in the family… At the end of the day this film Is about love. Love.”
The audience of the film festival is responding as per their expectations. Soon everyone else will get a chance to go on this journey with George.
“It’s been a great response from people,” McQueen said. “I think in London and New York, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. This is what cinema can do and this is what I wanted. It’s as much about the audience: you can see yourself through a child’s eyes.
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