Blitz | The perversity of war from a child’s perspective according to Steve McQueen

(London) In his latest film BlitzSteve McQueen wanted to denounce the “perverseness” of war and our propensity to “look away” from its dark reality, explains the Oscar-winning British director in an interview with AFP.

This stark World War II epic, which opened the London Film Festival on Wednesday, traces the Nazi army’s massive bombing of Britain between 1940 and 1941 – the Blitz – through the eyes of a child 9 year old mixed race, George.

The latter flees when he is taken with other children into the countryside far from the fighting, and embarks on a frantic race to find his mother (played by Saoirse Ronan) and his grandfather (played by the musician Paul Weller) in London’s East End.

For Steve McQueen, also the film’s screenwriter, choosing to put a child at the center of this story was using “a blank page” to show the “perverse” of war.

“With adults […] there is a moment when we tend to look away […] or not to listen,” explains the 55-year-old director, Oscar winner for 12 Years a Slave (2013).

“But for a child, it’s good or bad, right or wrong… it’s really sobering.”

In one scene in the film, George, played by the impressive Elliott Heffernan, watches, disconcerted, as his neighborhood is completely destroyed by German bombs.

“Timeless”

At another moment, he sees another boy on the run like him, being hit head-on by a train.

McQueen was partly inspired by his childhood in London, but also by a 2003 commission from the Imperial War Museum, which sent him to Iraq as an “official artist” during the Second World War. of the Gulf.

But it was the discovery in 2020, while he was working for a television project, of the photo of a black child in a station, waiting to be evacuated, which sparked the idea for the film.

“I said to myself, ‘This is my front door! “I need to tell this particular story, to see this idea of ​​the Blitz through his eyes,” he recalls.

This also allows him to describe the racism that prevailed at the time of the war in the United Kingdom, a subject little highlighted in the usual evocation and mythology around the Blitz.

“We are fighting our enemy as much as ourselves in a certain way […] whether it’s sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, there are all sorts of things happening,” he explains.

“You can’t make a film about society without telling what’s really going on, whatever form that takes,” McQueen adds.

Above all, the director claims to have wanted “the heart of the story” to be a story of family love.

“The most important thing in this story is love, the love between a mother and her son. It’s timeless,” he says.

“Ordinary people”

If this part of the story is fiction, McQueen constructed his characters from real people and researched extensively “to make things as realistic as possible”.

Because of this desire to see “ordinary people” lead the story, the soldiers in combat or the leaders of the time, such as Prime Minister Winston Churchill, are absent from Blitz.

“It wasn’t my subject,” asserts Steve McQueen.

The director is particularly happy that the premiere of his film will take place in London. “I wouldn’t have wanted it to be done anywhere else,” he said.

The success of the film also owes a lot to its actors, and in particular to the young Elliott Heffernan, who impressed the director during the distribution.

“A lot of times you don’t really know what you’re looking for, and then you find out when you see it, that’s the exciting part,” comments Steve McQueen.

During the tests, he remembers finding the young actor “fascinating”. “You want to look at him, almost like a silent film star.”

A lot of things also play out in the complicity between the child and Saoirse Ronan, who was “protective” towards him.

“This connection was obvious. We saw it on the screen, it was wonderful,” says McQueen.

Blitz will be released in cinemas from 1^er November, before being broadcast on Apple TV+ from November 22.