Apple has released the trailer for Steve McQueen’s new film, Blitz:
Deadline’s Baz Bamigboy has an interview with McQueen in Deadline where the director talks about the origins for the film. From the interview:
Blitz, which re-creates London at the height of the German blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” eschews the Dickie Attenborough school of Britain’s World War II films — the ones stuffed with stiff-upper-lip, pasty-faced types parading about in starched white shirts and showing off their military regalia.
McQueen wasn’t having any of what he calls “cardboard cutout” Brits in Blitz, which he researched thoroughly. Many of the film’s characters — air-raid wardens, musicians and folk who managed the bomb shelters, especially ones located deep in the tunnels of London Underground stations — are based on real people.
A few were much like, in spirit at least, some of the soldiers McQueen met when he was sent by the Imperial War Museum to Iraq during the 2003 Middle East conflict to serve as Official War Artist. He recalls being embedded with British forces in Basra and Baghdad and hearing all those voices and listening to these regional accents from Glasgow to Newcastle to Sheffield, Somerset and Swansea, he says. “Having conversations about their kit and buying stuff off the Americans,” he laughs.
He’d seen a photo that became the inspiration for the film:
The whole interview is here, and it gives a better idea of what Blitz is really about as opposed to the movie we all had in our heads.