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irector/writer/producer Steve McQueen burst onto the interna- tional 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 grandfa- ther 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 produc- tion 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 roll- ercoaster 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, revolu- tionary 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 sto- ryboarding for all of that. The previsual- ization 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 collabora- tion, 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 clas- sical framing to get audiences comfort- able, 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, STEVE MCQUEEN - BLITZ WORLD WAR II LONDON, LIKE IT'S NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE D DIRECTOR'S CHAIR www.postmagazine.com 10 POST NOV/DEC 2024 BY IAIN BLAIR Saoirse Ronan and Steve McQueen on the set of Blitz.