“In my part of the world, war hasn’t occurred for quite a while, so most of the time how we get our information about war is through the media,” writer-director Steve McQueen said at the 62nd New York Film Festival, where his new film”Blitz” was the closing night selection. Then, while researching his anthology “Small Axe,” he “came across this image of a boy, a Black child, standing on the railway station waiting to be taken away, evacuated … and I thought, who are you? I want to know more about you.” And he wanted to re-frame the experience of war by showing it through the eyes of a child. Watch McQueen’s discussion about the film above.
“Blitz” follows Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and George (Elliott Heffernan), a mother and son caught in London during the Blitz, the period in World War II when Germany enacted a brutal bombing campaign against the United Kingdom. “There’s 800,000 children that were evacuated,” McQueen explained. “Their parents didn’t know where they were going. They didn’t know when they were coming back … Family members were separated. It was heavy.”
McQueen feels that there’s a moral clarity that comes through the perspectives of children. “I was interested in what happened before we compromised, what happened before we turned a blind eye, what happened before we pretended not to listen,” he explained. “As a child, it’s good or bad, right and wrong, and that’s it. So I just liked the idea of refocusing the audience’s gaze onto war in a way where we can actually have a bit of sanity rather than all the complications we put in front of us. I wanted right and wrong, and I wanted good or bad. I wanted to confront the situation of what it really is. Killing anyone is not a good idea in any shape, form, or way, and I just wanted to get back to that … Often through a child’s eyes one can understand that.”
The film also presents a “very cosmopolitan” London that was more diverse than it’s often portrayed. “There was a huge Chinese community. There was a place in London … [where] there were three Black clubs. But you never see this depicted in movies at all, do you? For me it was just like cowboys and Indians and finding out Native Americans aren’t the bad guys.” But showing greater diversity isn’t “about just ticking boxes. It’s about telling stories, and I think right now … I can’t be more grateful that this film exists to just refocus our eyes as adults and get back to a place where we get our marbles back. We’ve gone insane.”
