Steve McQueen shows wartime London through a child’s eyes

It was a single photograph that started Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen on the journey to make “Blitz.” As a Londoner, the German bombing raids on the city during World War II are never all that far from his mind. Reminders of it are everywhere. But the spark of inspiration came from an image of a small boy on a train platform with a large suitcase. Stories inspired by the evacuation are not rare, but this child was Black. Who was he, McQueen wondered, and what was his story? The film, in theatres from Friday and streaming on Apple TV+ on Nov. 22, tells the tale of George, a 9-year-old biracial child in East London whose life with his mother, Rita ( Saoirse Ronan ), and grandfather is upended by the war. Like many children at the time, he’s put on a train to the countryside for his safety. But he hops off and starts a long, dangerous journey back to his mom, encountering all sorts of people and situations that paint a revelatory and emotional picture of that moment.

When McQueen finished the screenplay, he thought to himself: “Not bad.” Then he started to worry: Does George exist? Is there a person out there who can play this role? Through an open casting call they found Elliott Heffernan, a 9-year-old living just outside of London whose only experience was a school play. He was the genie in “Aladdin.” “There was a stillness about him, a real silent movie star quality,” McQueen said. “You wanted to know what he was thinking, and you leant in. That’s a movie star quality: A presence in his absence.”

Elliott is now 11. When he was cast, he’d not yet heard about the evacuation and imagined that a film set would be made up of “about 100 people.” But he soon found his footing, cycling in and out of the little vignettes along the way of George’s odyssey with stunts, slaps and all. Elliott, for his part, preferred the days with stunts. “It’s just more exciting,” Elliott said.

As his on-screen mother and co-star, Ronan, who remembers well the strange experience of being a child on a movie set, took him under her wing. Now, not only is he getting raves for his performance, he’s already booked another film (though he can’t talk about that yet). Another bonus: He’s fully impressed his teachers with his WWII knowledge. Ronan told her agent she wanted to take a break after “The Outrun,” with one caveat: Steve McQueen. “He was like, ‘well, on that...,’” Ronan laughed.

“I was really excited by the idea that the love story that was going to exist in this kind of wartime epic would be a child and his mother,” Ronan said. “It was a story set during the Second World War that was going to stay on the ground. It was going to focus on the communities left at home and the ongoing war that they were facing every day that they stepped outside their front door.” But McQueen needed a singer, and Ronan was an unknown quantity. They enlisted a vocal coach to visit her on a set where she was filming in Australia. “I’ll never forget, I got a call saying, ‘Steve, she can not only sing, but it’s only going to get better,’” McQueen said. “I was very happy to call her back and say, ‘you got it.’”

Both Ronan and Elliott would get to sing alongside Paul Weller, the English rock star of the Jam and Style Council, in his first acting role as George’s kind grandfather. Rita also gets a solo showstopper in the original song “Winter Coat,” written by Nicholas Britell and Taura Stinson and inspired by McQueen’s own late father. She performs it during a live radio broadcast at the munitions factory where she works. Showing that munitions factory was important to “Blitz.” In war movies, women are not often front and center. When they are, McQueen said, it’s a crying wife, or girlfriend, someone offering a cup of tea. This, he knew, was not the reality.

Associated Press