Steve McQueen doesn’t do anything by halves. Case in point: his last film wasn’t just a film. It was five films, the Small Axe anthology, released on the BBC in late 2020, telling Black British stories set between the 1960s and ’80s – illuminating essential pieces of history that had rarely, if ever, been told on the screen. Next, McQueen is digging even further into the past with Blitz, a big-screen release that, per its title, explores the bombardment of London in World War II. It does so through the eyes of George (Elliott Heffernan), a young boy whose escape to the country doesn’t go as planned, and instead finds himself traversing the blazing city while his mother (played by Saoirse Ronan) searches for him.
As McQueen tells Empire in a major new interview, the seeds of his latest work were sown during his previous endeavour. “While doing research for Small Axe, I found this picture of this Black child, this little boy, whose overcoat was too big for him and his suitcase was too big,” he recalls, “and I thought, ‘Who’s that guy? What’s his story?’” To unpack the story of George, McQueen looked to fresh talent. “Elliott Heffernan had never acted before,” he says. “We auditioned a lot of people, and when we saw him, there was just something about him. He wasn’t cute, at all; he was real. You couldn’t read him that well, but also he reflected you, in a way. He’s like a Buster Keaton; there’s presence in his absence.”
In all, Blitz allowed McQueen to dig into a piece of London history that hides in plain sight. “London is a strange kind of place, with all this evidence of the past, but it’s not spoken about,” the filmmaker explained explains. “I remember growing up in the ’80s, and there were so many things going on in these derelict buildings, but you never thought about why they were there, about the Blitz.” Get ready to see that history brought to vivid life.
Read Empire’s full Steve McQueen interview – talking Blitz, British history, and his filmmaking career so far – in The Terminator At 40 issue, on sale Thursday 26 September. Order a copy online here. Blitz comes to UK cinemas on 1 November, and streams on Apple TV+ from 22 November.