🎧 Steve McQueen: WWII Horrors, Through a Child's Eyes
The acclaimed director tells me his daughter's reaction to a leaf inspired his unique take on the London Blitz
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When director Steve McQueen’s daughter was about two, she asked him to look at a leaf. Any parent is familiar with this scenario, asked to behold some common object and feign wonder. But because he is Steve McQueen, an artist and filmmaker who can wield incredible power with images, McQueen did more than just fake it.
“ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s a leaf. And I thought, it’s a leaf,” McQueen recalled recently. “Through her eyes, I saw a leaf again for the first time. And it was that innocence, allowing me to have that double take, which I thought could be interesting as a narrative into the idea of making a film about war.”
McQueen joined me on the Prestige Junkie podcast this week to talk about Blitz, a film that depicts one of the most frequently dramatized events of the 20th century — World War II — in an entirely new way. Part of that is thanks to McQueen’s unparalleled visual style, combining an unflinching attention to the horrors of war with moments of beauty and even abstraction. But for the first time McQueen, 55, tells his story through the perspective of a child, a mixed-race London boy named George (Elliott Heffernan) who encounters the world in a far different way than a white child would.
The London-born writer-director based the character on a photo of a real boy escaping the Blitz, and says when he first saw the photo, “ I felt that I wanted to protect him, not just from German bombers, but from the environment he would be sent off to.”
In the years since he started making Blitz, with wars breaking out in Gaza and Ukraine, McQueen says the photograph only has become more powerful. “It seems like the world's on fire with all these wars going on in the world, and therefore I felt a sense of urgency,” he says. “I wanted to have a situation where you could write a story that can provoke and awaken an audience in some ways.”
This week’s podcast also includes a conversation with Vulture’s Joe Reid, turning our attention in the height of Oscar season to a whole other set of awards: television awards! The Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards both recognize TV, and the SAG Awards aren’t far behind. Later this week I’ll have more from my interviews at our first-ever Series Business showcase last week, where I caught up with the showrunners and executive producers behind several of the year’s best new shows: Nobody Wants This, English Teacher and A Man on the Inside (as well as the just concluded What We Do in the Shadows).
So how are those new efforts as well as such shows as The Penguin and Matlock going to hold their own against last year’s Emmy heavyweights like Shogun and Hacks? What might the Golden Globes tell us about any of this? Joe and I do our best to explain it all.
