Steve McQueen: ‘It was always Saoirse Ronan and her mother. So there was this bond. There’s this kinship’

I like Sir Steve McQueen. I’ve been running into him since 2008, when, hitherto a gallery-based visual artist, he transferred successfully to feature films with the transcendent Hunger. I remember jawing outside the American Hotel in Amsterdam as he explained how a Londoner of West Indian descent became so interested in the Irish hunger strikes. He’s always intense. He’s always engaged. He will invariably find something to push back against.
That peculiarly brilliant film, which made a star of Michael Fassbender, could have been an eccentric one-off. But McQueen built on the success. Shame eerily examined sex addiction; 12 Years a Slave won the Oscar for best picture. In the lockdown year he released an untouchable series of TV films on the black experience in London entitled Small Axe.
He may live in the Dutch capital, but London runs through his veins like oily winds through the Northern line. So we should not be altogether surprised that, for his most mainstream project yet, he has taken on that city’s great modern myth and tragedy.
Many thought Blitz, a study of London during the Luftwaffe’s raids, would launch at the Cannes or Venice film festivals. Those are the most prestigious festivals for a world premiere. But it has turned up first as the opening title at London Film Festival. I suspect that may be down to the director himself.
“I don’t think there’s anywhere else in the world it could have debuted,” he says a day or so before the premiere in October. “It’s a movie about London. When do we ever get the opportunity to have a film debut at London Film Festival and it’s about London? Me being a Londoner. Sometimes it’s not about anything other than what’s right.”
Quite correct. The premiere took place at Royal Festival Hall, on the south bank of the Thames. That venue was unveiled in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain, an event conceived to celebrate the nation’s recovery after the second World War.
“This is it – hand in glove,” he says. “All over the south bank was bombed. So it’s going to be pretty interesting having that premiere in whatever building it’s in. In London! It’s going to be pretty interesting to walk out into the street and see the evidence of things not seen.”
Blitz focuses on a tight family of three trying to keep heads aloft as the bombs fall in 1940. Our own Saoirse Ronan plays a single mum called Rita. The newcomer Elliott Heffernan is her mixed-ethnicity son, George. The musician Paul Weller reveals acting chops as Rita’s dad.
We begin with George being grumpily evacuated to the country. He and his new pals object to their banishment from the city and jump the train as it trundles through the suburbs. A long, noisy odyssey (no other word will do) takes the boy from saintly helpers to malign exploiters as he makes his way back to Mum.
[ Blitz review: Could Saoirse Ronan be on track for a double Oscar nomination with her new film?Opens in new window ]
McQueen spoke of the “things not seen”. I take that to mean the structures that were there before the bombing. Raised in Ealing, McQueen, later part of the radical artists who trained at Goldsmiths’ College, would surely, as a kid, have seen evidence of the raids. It took decades for all the gaps to be filled.
“There was evidence all over the place,” he says. “Half the adventure playgrounds I remember were bombed out areas or whatever. When I was growing up in the 1980s and even the 1990s, a lot of those warehouse parties were in those abandoned areas. It took a long time. We didn’t even think about it.”
In 1999, at the height of media hoo-ha about the so-called Young British Artists, McQueen beat Tracey Emin and her notorious bed to the Turner Prize. That award for contemporary art then got as much attention as the Booker Prize (maybe more). Four years later he was sent to cover the Iraq war as an artist and delivered a series, comprising postage stamps depicting soldiers who had died in the conflict, entitled Queen and Country. It was there that the seeds of Blitz were sewn.
“To be in an active situation of war – a theatre, as they call it – as a civilian was very illuminating. We gather information about wars or conflicts through the media. But there I was on the front line. It opened my eyes. It was the first time I ever felt any sense of nationalism.
“Because I was with these guys from Glasgow – you know, wherever – from Swansea in Wales, from Surrey to Newcastle to Liverpool. Everywhere around the UK. It was very interesting being thrown together and having these heartfelt conversations. And they were buying all their kit off Americans. It was a very strange situation to be in. That’s the perversity of war.”
The film does not deny the fabled Blitz spirit. We see Rita and her neighbours gather in the Underground stations to hear stirring political speeches. But Blitz also nods to the looting from shops and stealing from the dead that inevitably accompanied the destruction. About halfway through, George encounters a young woman in the street who lures him into a den of colourful thieves.
He is soon persuaded to work his smaller hands towards jewellery in wrecked shops and to indulge in worse after a bombing modelled on that at the Café de Paris nightclub, near Piccadilly Circus. I was not the only critic who noted unmistakable parallels with Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. There is a version of Fagin and a version of Nancy. One could, at a stretch, see Kathy Burke’s character as a variation on Bill Sikes.
“I don’t think there are any parallels with Oliver Twist,” McQueen says. “Other than the fact … Theres’s no parallels. He’s not an orphan.”
It may be an accident. But there are parallels in the story.
“Like what?”
You have a young kid adrift in London ­– the East End to a large extent – who, on a shopping trip, is picked up by a woman who …
“That’s one aspect of the movie. But let’s be honest. Let’s be truthful. That whole section lasts for nine minutes. And the fact of the matter is this is about criminality and poverty. That’s what it’s about. I was not interested in Dickens at all. But I was interested in criminality and poverty and what people do and what they can be exploited for. In nine minutes.”
Anyway, there is, as he says, a lot more to the film than that one episode. Ronan is back on historical duties as the spirited, mostly distraught Rita. She gets a big moment early on when a radio crew, making a patriotic broadcast, comes to the armaments factory where she works and records her singing a newly written ballad by McQueen and Nicholas Britell.
“I didn’t know if she could sing,” McQueen says. “She could sing. And I thought, ‘Amazing’. I thought, ‘Okay, interesting’. There’s an earthiness to Saoirse. But also there’s a sense of honesty. People know if someone’s lying. I thought, ‘Okay, she could do this’. When we talked about the role I knew she wanted it. She was talking about her relationship with her mother. It was always her and her mother. So there was this bond. There’s this kinship. They were always together, just those two.”
He’s not wrong. Ronan recently told me, when we were discussing the misuse of women in the industry, that her mum had been by her side until she was 19.
[ Saoirse Ronan: ‘Going out and getting wrecked … I’m careful about when and where I do that’Opens in new window ]
“I like when actors bring their own personal thing to it, so it’s not just stepping into something they have no idea about,” McQueen says. “When Elliott came in they had this beautiful relationship. I think, because she started when she was nine years old, she knew what he was going through. So, in some ways, that bond is real: all the tenderness, all the beautifulness, all the attention. All the love in the picture was real. And also with Paul. I was very heart-warmed by the fact that these three people love being in each other’s company. Three different generations.”
Yes, Paul Weller is maybe the film’s secret weapon. Born in 1969, McQueen is just about old enough to have enjoyed The Jam at the height of their chart-topping hegemony. He was certainly of an age to drift along to The Style Council and the solo work. I wonder what convinced him the singer might be able to act.
“Anyone who can write songs like he can and perform them can translate into acting,” he says. “I thought, ‘You’re performative. You can perform’. And I think, at first, he didn’t really trust me on that. He didn’t believe me. I got an acting coach and stuff like that, and then he did it. I knew he could do it. Also, don’t forget, Paul has the most wonderful face, he’s aged so well. I thought there’s a certain kind of thing that you could read in him. He’s beautiful in this picture.”
He says Weller has a wonderful face. He does. He also has a face that looks at home in the 1940s. Is that a crazy thing to say? Do people have period-appropriate faces?
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” McQueen says. “Also his frame is very slight. He’s a very slim man. At that time there wasn’t loads of different kinds of food. People are a bit more bloated now. It was a hand-in-glove situation again. But could he do it? And he could, thank goodness. He led into the poetry of it all. We needed someone with presence. He’s not in it for very long, but you could feel he had this connection with George.”
Blitz is also very much about the black experience during the war. The traditional British war film of the 1940s and 1950s moved through versions of London without acknowledging the diversity. We learn about George’s West Indian dad in a flashback. A British-African air-raid warden walks the kid through the chaos.
“My interest is looking at historical events and making a movie,” he says. “It’s interesting how London at that time was very cosmopolitan. There was a large Chinese community. There were black clubs. There were three black clubs on Seven Dials, for example,” McQueen says, referring to the area of central London between Covent Garden and Shaftesbury Avenue.
He mentions Humphrey Jennings’s great 1943 Blitz documentary Fires Were Started.
“Among the first people you see walking down the road is a Chinese guy. But, unfortunately, as you said, you don’t really see that in movies. But that’s not my concern. My concern is making a realistic adaptation of what was going on at that time.”
He’s interested in more than that. Prompted, he sums his objective up in something like poetry.
“I’m interested in the truth,” he says. “And the truth is that all we have, all that’s worth living for and all what’s worth dying for is love. That’s what I want to focus on.”
Blitz is in cinemas now and will stream on Apple TV+ from Friday, November 22nd