Filmmakers Steve McQueen and Edward Berger immediately connected upon sitting down for TheWrap’s Visionaries, a new video series featuring in-depth conversations between Hollywood’s most innovative creators during awards season. The two bonded not just as directors and not even just as artists, but as people who don’t do this kind of thing often. “I’ve never had a one-on-one conversation like this,” Berger said candidly at the start of the chat. “I don’t have these conversations at all!” McQueen retorted with a laugh.
What ensued was a lengthy discussion on their respective unusual paths to filmmaking and mutual admiration as both individuals are earning acclaim for their latest features. Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave” filmmaker McQueen just released his World War II film “Blitz” through Apple TV+, an epic war film that charts one boy’s journey through London during the Blitz. While Berger’s “Conclave,” a thrilling power-struggle drama from Focus Features is centered around a papal conclave to select the next Pope, and hit theaters in October fresh off his Oscar wins for “All Quiet on the Western Front” last year.
McQueen and Berger bonded over their shared interest in filmmaking as an art form as young men. McQueen studied as a painter in art school and Berger went to one day of engineering school before swapping to art school. “I was really interested in film as art, not as narrative,” Berger explained.
“I could always draw at a very early age,” McQueen said of his path to directing movies. “So it went drawing then painting and then cameras, and it was kind of an evolution.”
Speaking about film as art, McQueen praised Berger’s framing of star Ralph Fiennes in “Conclave,” specifically when it came to closeups. “His face becomes the landscape,” McQueen said. “It’s the Vatican, it’s the room, but the most interesting thing in that space is Ralph dealing with all this weight.”
Berger revealed that when he had the opportunity to do some pickups on “Conclave” after principal photography wrapped, he and his collaborators decided tweak the ending.
“It was the future Pope’s speech at the end. October 7 happened, and I felt some of the feeling of the speech should change a bit,” Berger said of the deadly attack on Israel by Hamas. “It just felt different. The time is never mentioned, but somehow the feeling that we had after those attacks, [writer] Peter [Straughan] and [producer] Tessa [Ross] and I felt we needed to somehow change the language of it a little bit.” Berger said the new ending was about making the speech more “about love.”
McQueen, meanwhile, brought his background as a war artist in 2003 Iraq to how he captured World War II in “Blitz.”
“What was interesting about that is that this camaraderie I felt, it’s nationalism I felt for the first time, and it was perverse, because it came out of war,” McQueen said of being in Iraq. “I was thinking to myself, I want to bring the war home. I need to because the majority of us, I would say, the lucky people who have never experienced war, how we experience war often in the West is through the media, and it’s abstract. It’s graphic. You’re numb to it after a while.”
McQueen said by bringing the war home on film, he “really wanted to unlock a certain kind of deadness to it, and of course, through a child’s eyes, amplify it even more to get back to a moment where we can actually see things again for the first time using this drama.”
Watch the full Visionaries conversation in the video above, and check out our previous Visionaries interview between Colman Domingo and “Sing Sing” director Greg Kwedar right here.
The post Steve McQueen and Edward Berger Talk War in ‘Blitz’ and Why the ‘Conclave’ Ending Changed After Oct. 7 | Visionaries appeared first on TheWrap.
