Behind The Scenes: Blitz

Your perception of war depends not just on when or where you were born but which level of social strata you inhabit. John Boorman’s recollection of the Luftwaffe’s lightening war on London in Hope and Glory (1987), was as an adventure. Untouched by war, Steven Spielberg drew on JG Ballard’s experiences in post-Pearl Harbour Shanghai for an equally exhilarating rites of passage in Empire of the Sun. British director Steve McQueen, was born in 1969 and grew up in Ealing’s West Indian community, but his archaeology of World War II on the home front is coloured by a British Imperial destruction.

Blitz is a Brothers Grimm style fairy tale which follows the harrowing journey of nine year old George (Elliott Heffernan), whose mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) evacuates him to safety in the English countryside. George, defiant and determined to return home to Rita and his grandfather, Gerald (Paul Weller), in East London, jumps the train and walks back into a bombed out and broken-down society.

The 12 Years A Slave director first started thinking about making a film about the Blitz in the early 2000s but it was only when he discovered a photograph while researching the BBC anthology film series Small Axe that he finally found a way in.

Behind the scenes Behind the Scenes: Small Axe

“It was an image of a small Black boy standing on a train platform with a large suitcase,” says McQueen. “That image stayed with me in an almost omnipresent ghostly way, and I continued to find myself wondering who this child was, what was his story during the Blitz?”

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“The challenge of lighting and framing was to follow George intimately in his wandering, to empathise with him in all the adventures and things he encounters, and suddenly, to exaggerate a hostile adult world.” - Yorick Le Saux, Director of Photography

In his capacity as official War Artist for Iraq in 2003 for the Imperial War Museum, the director gained first-hand accounts of war. That led him into deeper research of the Blitz.

McQueen discovered authentic stories that he wanted to incorporate into his screenplay: Young firefighters were barely trained and terrified and that a West End night club called Café de Paris was bombed in 1941, killing 34 people. Shortly after the bombing, reports arose of looters stealing jewellery and expensive items from the deceased clientele.

The photo of the boy at the train station also affected the look of the film for French DP Yorick Le Saux AFC (Little Women; Irma Vep). “In every shot, we wanted the audience to feel the coexistence of life and death,” Le Saux says. “There was an image that we kept referring to where a woman is sweeping her floor, even though half of the house is missing, having been destroyed by a bomb the previous night. It was shocking to see people continuing their domestic work in such dramatic settings, but this was, of course, how they coped.”

Le Saux also points to the work of artist Henry Moore, who produced many drawings of Londoners sheltering during the Blitz. The Imperial War Museum provided access to many images from the era that had never been publicly released. McQueen and Le Saux also looked to archival footage from journalists and filmmakers who kept a record of the period. “We even looked at some pictures of the Ukraine war, to make the connection with nowadays and to realise that, almost a century later, it is the same,” Le Saux says.

Given that the production was working with a child actor, as well as undertaking a large amount of night shoots, there was a need for efficiency and reliability so the decision was made to film digitally, softened with vintage lenses and working with a palette soft blues, greys and lipstick reds of wartime colour photography.

“The idea was to create an environment that was representative of Londoners living in a permanent black out during the Blitz,” Le Saux explains. “The challenge of lighting and framing was to follow George intimately in his wandering, to empathise with him in all the adventures and things he encounters, and suddenly, to exaggerate a hostile adult world.”

The terror of the Luftwaffe bombardment from the skies is rendered abstract like white noise accompanied by Hans Zimmer’s pounding score. Editor Peter Sciberras (Power of the Dog) also worked from footage Humphrey Jennings’s 1943 docudrama of the Blitz, Fires Were Started.

Reconstructing Tragedy

With the London Docks almost unrecognisable since the 1940s (and with the capital being an expensive location to shoot) the production shot exteriors of a cobbled street and close-knit houses in Hull. The city’s transport hub (Hull Paragon Interchange) was a crucial element for the film’s departure sequence featuring children like George being evacuated. It had the scale of a London station but a visual freshness as well.

The production recreated the Café de Paris at Leavesden Studios and a flooded tube station on a stage just big enough to fit a 175-foot tube platform. The interior of the set was waterproofed and filled with water, rather than putting the set into a tank full of water.

Cinesite provided 140 invisible VFX shots focusing on the 1940s London environment and bombing sequences.

“The elaborate sets and locations built by the art department provided the framework for us to add in practical fire, smoke and water where possible, and for that practical effects work to inform the digital set extensions and pyro that were required to add the necessary scope in post-production,” says VFX supervisor, Andrew Whitehurst.

Alongside historical precision the brief demanded that the city felt “emotionally correct” within the drama, as Whitehurst puts it. “London, with its drifting smoke, dust, burning and burned-out buildings, required a careful and delicate balance of aesthetic, narrative and historical considerations.”

A shot towards the end of the film shows George running down a street as the camera cranes up and we see the destruction of the city beyond. Whitehurst explains, “In the foreground the building closest to us has recently been bombed out and the debris of the destroyed house is piled up. On location, the site of this recreated bombed-out house had, in reality, been a building that was bombed, so there was a particular poignancy in recreating a tragic and turbulent moment in the history of that street.”

Behind the scenes Behind the Scenes: Occupied City