WITH HIS NEW WORLD WAR II DRAMA BLITZ, UNCOMPROMISING FILMMAKER STEVE MCQUEEN IS ONCE MORE TACKLING WEIGHTY, VITAL MATERIAL. HE TELLS US ABOUT HIS ONGOING MISSION TO BREAK NEW GROUND

WORDS ELLEN E JONES

Steve McQueen, photographed exclusively for Empire at the Imperial War Museum, London, on 29 August 2024.

MISAN HARRIMAN

HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT STEVE MCQUEEN, AS A MAN AND AS A FILMMAKER:

he will not waste your time. Not with false modesty, nor with empty boasting. Not by suffering fools or flattering royalty. This is sometimes mistaken for brusqueness. It isn’t. It’s a guarantee that when a single shot of a priest conversing with a prisoner lasts 17 minutes and 11 seconds (as in 2008 feature debut Hunger), or when his 2023 Holocaust documentary Occupied City takes four hours and 26 minutes (not including interval), every moment is necessary and accounted for.

It’s this disciplined focus on what McQueen emphatically calls “the work… The W-O-R-K” which has enabled the 54-year-old to frequently pull off seemingly impossible feats over the course of a still relatively young filmmaking career. There are the oft-cited accolades —the Turner Prize, the Oscar, the Golden Globe, the BAFTAs and the knighthood —but also a host of, when you really think about it, more impressive achievements. This is the man who disproved decades of received industry ‘wisdom’ on box-office viability with 2013’s 12 Years A Slave; who magnificently crowned a year of #BlackLivesMatter uprising in 2020 with Black British opus Small Axe; who, in the aftermath of tragedy, secured a grieving community’s permission to shoot the remains of Grenfell Tower from a helicopter. And who else would think to adapt a sophisticated Hollywood neo-noir from a 1980s ITV drama (as he did with Widows)?

McQueen’s latest, Blitz, is another compendium of cinematic wonders, both spectacular and subtle; a scrupulously historical epic about that much-claimed and contested period between September 1940 and May 1941, when Britain endured sustained bombing from Hitler’s Luftwaffe. But this is not the Blitz of Faragist myth-making or stiff-upper-lip wartime propaganda. Rather, it’s seen through the eyes of young George (Elliott Heffernan), a mixed-race, east-London evacuee, and his spirited single mum Rita (Saoirse Ronan), who along their way encounter a Dickensian gallery of friends and foes played by Paul Weller, Kathy Burke, Stephen Graham, Harris Dickinson, Hayley Squires, Linton Kwesi Johnson and more.