McQueen, Steve (Filmmaker)

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    How ‘Blitz’ Recreates War-Torn London

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    Steve McQueen’s latest film, set in 1940 during Germany’s bombardment of the British capital, draws extensively from contemporary photos, and was shot entirely outside London.In a London train station, a young Black child clutches a suitcase with both hands. Drowning in his coat, he wears a flat cap and a stoic expression, striding toward his future as an evacuee. The photograph, taken during the eight-month-long bombardment of British cities by German forces during World War II, was one of the images that inspired Steve McQueen’s new film “Blitz,” currently in select theaters.The boy, carrying his small suitcase as he evacuated London in 1940, inspired the character of George in “Blitz.”AlamyThe film is told from the perspective of George (Elliott Heffernan), a biracial 9-year-old who is evacuated from London to the countryside as bombs descend on his hometown. Mid-journey, he escapes the train, abandoning his suitcase and weaving his way back to his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), in east London.Doing research for the film, McQueen and its production designer, Adam Stockhausen, were struck again and again by “the incongruity, and the heartbreak,” of images of life in London during the bombing, Stockhausen said in a recent interview. McQueen would see a photo of a woman sweeping out her ruined house or one of a man sitting in a chair and smoking a cigarette, the home around him reduced to rubble, and build a scene around it, Stockhausen added.The film’s production design is meticulous — Stockhausen previously collaborated with McQueen on “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows” — and seen through George’s eyes, 1940s London is a sprawling labyrinth. Depicting the sweep of the city was essential to the narrative, Stockhausen said, but shooting in London would have been too difficult and expensive, and the team wanted to avoid a C.G.I. set.Adam Stockhausen, left, the film’s production designer, and Steve McQueen, the director, working on set.via AppleWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Watch a Nightclub Scene in ‘Blitz’

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      The writer and director Steve McQueen discusses a sequence set in the Café de Paris in London.The writer and director Steve McQueen narrates a sequence from his film set in London during World War II.Apple TV+ In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.The film “Blitz” primarily deals with the trials of a mother (Saoirse Ronan) and son (Elliott Heffernan) during World War II in London. But the film expands out to look at the ways the war was affecting the entire city.Narrated by the writer and director Steve McQueen, the sequence featured here doesn’t include the principal actors. It takes place in the Café de Paris, a popular nightclub in the city. The scene’s appearance in the film feels like a diversion, but that’s exactly what those inside the club are seeking.“The symbolic nature of the Café de Paris in the movie,” said McQueen in his narration, “is to show the divide between the rich and poor.”The camera glides through an audience and dancers to get to a stage with a band playing, led by Snakehips Johnson (Devon McKenzie-Smith). A spirited, and somewhat provocative, song is performed by Anita Sinclair (Celeste) that has significance because, McQueen said, it was “what was being played just before the bomb hit that club.”Read the “Blitz” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘Blitz’ Review: Love in the Ruins

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      Steve McQueen’s World War II drama may appear conventional on the surface, but don’t miss what it’s really doing.World War II is almost certainly the big screen’s most immortalized conflict, and for good reason. It broke just as cinema was beginning to mature as a form of entertainment, and footage from the front narrated by peppy tales of victory was part of many people’s moviegoing experience. What’s more, though, the outlines of World War II could be boiled down to clean tales of good versus evil, bravery versus cruelty — the sort of stories that make good two-hour feature films.As the historian Elizabeth Samet argues in her excellent 2021 book “Looking for the Good War,” the heroism performed in Hollywood’s World War II movies soon became the filter through which all American involvement in foreign wars was seen and encouraged. In the aftermath of war, she writes, “causes are retrofitted,” and “participants fondly recall heroic gestures.” The tendency extends far beyond America, because the tale of valor richly rewarded and goodness winning the day is the kind of World War II movie we want to see — and the kind we mostly have.Yet most stories during the war didn’t end in glory and goodness. They ended in death and dismemberment, heartache and trauma, lives destroyed, families ripped apart. Yes, the good guys won. But winning a war still means losing.The British film industry is hardly immune to the triumphalist tales, and watching “Blitz,” I began to have a strong suspicion that those are precisely the movie’s target. The filmmaker Steve McQueen, whose film “12 Years a Slave” won the Oscar for best picture in 2014, works with the eye of a protesting artist, as aware of form as he is of content.In his 2018 film “Widows,” about women pulling off a heist, the form is that of a crime thriller. But the real subject is the class and economic contradictions of Chicago, which McQueen paints into the background except in one subtle, unforgettable scene: As characters have a conversation of some note in a car, the camera stays resolutely pointed out through the windshield, and we watch the setting starkly change from run-down projects to exquisite mansions in a matter of minutes. It’s a gutting accompaniment to the machinations of power being discussed in the car. You can’t really take one without the other.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Festival Winners Crowd New York Film Festival Main Slate Lineup

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      Top titles from Cannes and Berlin, like Sean Baker’s “Anora” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey,” join new work by Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.This fall’s New York Film Festival will feature celebrated prizewinners from Cannes and the Berlinale, organizers announced Tuesday, unveiling a main slate that will join new works from the filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.The festival, which runs Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, will screen films from 24 countries and include two world premieres, five North American premieres and 17 American premieres.Ross’s film, “The Nickel Boys,” is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about two Black teenagers in a Jim Crow-era Florida reform school. It’s the opening-night selection. Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” about a rekindled friendship between women played by Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, will be the centerpiece. And the festival will close with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” starring Saoirse Ronan as a working-class single mother in London who gets separated from her 9-year-old son during World War II.Winners from Cannes and the Berlin Film Festival feature heavily in the festival’s main slate lineup.Cannes imports include the Palme d’Or winner “Anora,” from Sean Baker; the Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light” from Payal Kapadia; best director winner Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour”; the two best-director winners from the Un Certain Regard section, Roberto Minervini with “The Damned” and Rungano Nyoni with “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”; and special prize winner “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” from Mohammad Rasoulof.Berlinale veterans playing in New York include the Golden Bear prizewinner “Dahomey,” a documentary from Mati Diop about the complicated postcolonial legacy of artifacts from the former African kingdom; Philippe Lesage’s Quebecois coming-of-age drama, “Who by Fire”; and the documentary “No Other Land,” about the destruction of West Bank villages by the Israeli military, made over five years by a Palestinian-Israeli collective.Two festival mainstays, the filmmakers Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, will each have two films playing this fall.Hong is bringing “By the Stream,” about a former film director, and “A Traveler’s Needs,” which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale and stars Isabelle Huppert as an inexperienced French teacher in a Seoul suburb. (Hong also showed two films last year.)The second and third parts of Wang’s observational nonfiction “Youth” trilogy, titled “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming)” and focused on migrant textile workers in the Chinese district of Zhili, will also screen at the festival. The first part of the trilogy, “Youth (Spring),” was included in last year’s lineup.“The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality,” the festival’s artistic director Dennis Lim said in a news release. “They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in and reimagine the world.” More

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      Celebrating Film Nostalgia With Ooze and Ahhs at Blobfest

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      In 1958, the sci-fi horror film “The Blob,” about a murderous, insatiable and ever-ballooning hunk of alien matter, opened in theaters across the United States. At the time, critics’ appetites for the movie were not as piqued as the onscreen monster’s.In a review for The New York Times, Howard Thompson wrote that “The Blob” was “woodenly presented,” and the “dialogue flattens as fast as the blob rounds.”Not even Steve McQueen in his first leading role could save the plot in Thompson’s eyes.But 66 years later, audiences are still hungry for more. The film became a cult classic, fitting snugly among other camp favorites like “Creature From the Black Lagoon” (1954) and “The Fly” (1958).And in Phoenixville, Pa., where much of the “The Blob” was shot, thousands of fans gathered at the 25th annual Blobfest over the weekend to celebrate with ooze and ahhs.A fire extinguisher parade kicked off the Blobfest celebration.Kat Graves, 22, dressed as Carrie (from the movie of the same name), won first place in the 18 and over category in the costume contest at Blobfest on Saturday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More