Director/writer/producer Steve McQueen burst onto the international scene in 2013 when his harrowing 12 Years A Slave dominated the awards season, winning the Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA for Best Picture. He followed that up with the heist thriller
Widows and the five-film anthology
Small Axe. His new film,
Blitz, is both an epic and an intimate family drama that follows the journey of George (Elliott Heffernan), a nine-year-old boy in World War II London, whose mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) sends him to safety in the English countryside during The Blitz. When George, defiant and determined to return home to his mom and his grandfather Gerald (Paul Weller) in East London, goes missing, a distraught Rita sets out to find him.
To make the film, McQueen reunited with Academy Award-winning production designer Adam Stockhausen, and teamed up with cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, editor Peter Sciberras and visual effects supervisor Andrew Whitehurst. Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, McQueen talks about making the film and his love of post.
What sort of film did you set out to make?
“I set out to make a film which was a rollercoaster ride. I wanted to make a movie almost like a Brothers Grimm fairytale, but at the same time a classically-told story that’d revert into things which are totally unclassical and, I hope, revolutionary because they’ve never been seen before, to illuminate London as it was during The Blitz.”
What were the big challenges of pulling this massive production together?
“The real challenge was to get a family where you felt that there was this love, as I think the basis of this picture is love. Once you had the love and an understanding of what the foundation of this film was, then everything else would be easy. My anxiety was actually just to find that love, that sort of family, which had a certain kind of connection, and once we had Saoirse and Elliott, we were off to the races.”
Right from the opening sequence with the hose and the fires, and the terror of The Blitz, there’s so much going on. I assume you did a lot of previs for all these huge action sequences?
“Yeah, of course we planned out all the action sequences, and there was no storyboarding for all of that. The previsualization was done by Argon and Proof UK, and all our LIDAR and cyber scanning was by Clear Angle Studios. Again, with the out-of-control hose hitting people, it’s one of those images you have never seen before because it is overlooked. When you do research, you find out the mechanisms of how the firemen work and the machinery, and realize that these hoses were made out of canvas. They were leaky, they were inadequate and when you’ve got a movie that’s steeped in research like this one, then you could fly. You could do what you want, because it’s almost like a sci-fi movie. Once you’ve made your world, then you go for it. But this was the actual world, so it was a real pleasure to get into all the research, as it’s so rich.”
Obviously, you have to integrate all the visual effects and post from the get-go. What was entailed on this project?
“My plan was to do as few visual effects as possible, although you absolutely need some. So, when prepping with my production designer, Adam Stockhausen, I said I wanted to have as many real locations and set builds as possible, so all of that stuff you see in the opening with the hoses and fires, that’s all real. There’s no animation, no visual effects in that, because I knew that meant I’d have fewer visual effects to deal with later in post, and with more time to focus on them. The fewer visual effects you have to deal with in post, the better, and you could do them all justice.”
Tell us about your overall visual approach with cinematographer Yorick Le Saux.
“We shot it digitally on Alexa and the whole visual approach was from the kid’s perspective, so most of the time the camera’s low, because what happens then is everything becomes twice or three times as big. It becomes more of an epic in terms of scale because you’re looking through [George's] eyes onto the world. It’s bigger, and London as you know, is a huge and very dense city. So, by just bringing the camera down lower, everything has a much more massive scale and range. It was a great collaboration, and I love the way he lights and how he moves the camera. To get the classical look I wanted we used some very old lenses, which gave a great vintage look to the film, and the idea was to use classical framing to get audiences comfortable, and then show them things they’d never seen before. The shoot was a joy. It wasn’t tough at all, because I was in my element, so I was having a blast.”
Where did you post the film?
“All in Amsterdam and London, where I’m based. And I love the whole post process.”
This is the first time you’ve worked with editor Peter Sciberras. How did the process work?
“I like Peter because in some ways, we’re very similar. He’s Australian, but his family’s from Malta, so that immigrant background was interesting, and there was an understanding of George, as he had a small boy when we started, who was about four. So, there was the emotional attachment to the project. And of course, he is an amazing editor, and he has a want and need for truth as it were — a great quality. He was on-set, but I don’t think he liked being on-set. Most editors hate being on-set. He’d rather get all the footage and get on with it. We cut most of it in Amsterdam, and then we went back to London to finish it.”
What were the main editing challenges on this?
“Rather than challenges, I call it a sort of adventure. So, when there’s difficulties that crop up, there’s only solutions that can solve it, so it’s fantastic in that way. And it is not about seeing everything with rose-tinted glasses. It is just the fact that we have the opportunity to make something completely different than had been made before about this period. We were showing people that had never been given a platform, like these women at the munitions factory, and they’re the emotional backbone of the country and physical backbone of the country — of the whole war effort. You know, they’re supplying ammunition to the front. They’re looking after the elderly parents. They’re sending their kids off on trains to be evacuated. So therefore, anything which was sort of difficult in the edit couldn’t be any way as difficult as that. We just got on with it. And Pete and I were doing something we love.”
What was the most difficult scene to cut and why?
“Every one’s a difficult scene to cut, and we cut so many things so many times. We cut the big flashback dance-hall scene with Rita and Marcus, George’s father, where they first meet and dance, more than a few times just to get the rhythm right, and to get that sort of excitement and that kind of ferocity. That was difficult.”
What was your favorite scene to cut?
“The same musical one, because everyone was dancing, and the Cafe de Paris scene, because it’s so beautiful, with the flow of it. But what’s interesting about those two musical scenes is they’re very, very different. The flashback one is much more rough and earthy, while the Cafe de Paris one has this sort of elegant polish, because it’s very hoity-toity. So those were the two, because to cut with music is always wonderful.”
There are quite a few VFX. Who did them?
“This has more visual effects than I’ve ever worked with before. We had quite a few companies working on shots, and the majority of it was done by Raynault VFX and Cinesite in Montreal. Host VFX and ILM also did work, and all their artists were absolutely wonderful. When you’re working with people on that level, where the sensibility is so strong and there’s a certain kind of understanding of what you’re trying to do, it does help, and therefore what’s being produced is of a level which is very, very high. I mean, you can only be happy. I’d rather not work with lots of visual effects, but you have to because you can’t create certain things otherwise. But when you work with the right people, it is more than a pleasure.”
What was the trickiest visual effect to get right?
“I think the scene with George running out of the boat and the plane crashing into the building. It was pretty tricky getting that right. And the aftermath of the bombing. It was very important to get that right. We had to plan it very early on with Andrew Whitehurst, and all the sets and locations provided the framework for us to add in fire, smoke and water where possible. And those practical effects worked with the digital set extensions and pyro elements that were required to add the necessary scope in post production. And of course, we had to digitally remove all the modern buildings and create wide establishing shots of the burning city with visual effects.”
The film has great sound design and music. Tell us about creating that.
“That’s something I focus on a lot, the sound design and music. Hans Zimmer wrote a great score, and I worked closely with supervising sound editors/re-recording mixers Paul Cotterell and James Harrison for a couple of months, drilling into how sound can be visceral, how it can be sort of in your body, you know? Sometimes I lean more into the sound than images, because that’s how I grew up, listening to the radio, and it’s a situation where I want it to be visceral, not visual. Visceral is way more powerful than seeing something, and it really affects the emotions in the right way. We did a lot of very detailed work and mixed in the new Warner Bros. De Lane Lea studio in London, which is a dream space.”
The film is visually really beautiful. Tell us about the DI.
“We did it at Company 3 with my regular colorist, Tom Poole. It’s the fourth time we’ve worked together, and he’s the best. He’s an artist. There’s a sensibility, a certain kind of understanding of what we’re trying to do. He’s also a Londoner, so he understood the temperatures and the colors of that time. When you’re making a movie set in London 1940, what you’re really talking about is delving into our past and the details. Getting it right is what I’m about.”
Where does this rate in terms of creative satisfaction for you?
“At the top, because what I love about cinema is that one can bring people into a room and show them things they’ve never seen before.”