In a London train station, a young Black child clutches a suitcase with both hands. Drowning in his coat, he wears a flat cap and a stoic expression, striding toward his future as an evacuee. The photograph, taken during the eight-month-long bombardment of British cities by German forces during World War II, was one of the images that inspired Steve McQueen’s new film “Blitz,” currently in select theaters.
The film is told from the perspective of George (Elliott Heffernan), a biracial 9-year-old who is evacuated from London to the countryside as bombs descend on his hometown. Mid-journey, he escapes the train, abandoning his suitcase and weaving his way back to his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), in east London.
Doing research for the film, McQueen and its production designer, Adam Stockhausen, were struck again and again by “the incongruity, and the heartbreak,” of images of life in London during the bombing, Stockhausen said in a recent interview. McQueen would see a photo of a woman sweeping out her ruined house or one of a man sitting in a chair and smoking a cigarette, the home around him reduced to rubble, and build a scene around it, Stockhausen added.
The film’s production design is meticulous — Stockhausen previously collaborated with McQueen on “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows” — and seen through George’s eyes, 1940s London is a sprawling labyrinth. Depicting the sweep of the city was essential to the narrative, Stockhausen said, but shooting in London would have been too difficult and expensive, and the team wanted to avoid a C.G.I. set.
Instead, “Blitz” was shot on location in two other British towns — Hull and Chatham — and on a soundstage. Stockhausen explained how his team built Blitz-era London for the film, and how they then blew it apart.
The journey begins at London Paddington
Early in the film, Rita takes a reluctant George to the chaotic Paddington Station, from which real evacuees would have departed during the Blitz. Elbowing her way through a crowd of children, Rita eventually places George on a train.
McQueen was determined this sequence should be shot in a real train station, Stockhausen said, and after surveying a dossier of England’s mainline train stations and their terminals, they settled on Hull Paragon Station in East Yorkshire, more than 170 miles north of London.
The station’s high, domed roof made of stone and glass was the deciding factor: “The big stations in London have that feeling,” Stockhausen said.
Inside a bomb factory
After dropping off her son, Rita returns to work at a munitions factory. It was important, Stockhausen said, to show the gritty reality of the Blitz’s horrors, as well as its well-documented patriotic spirit.
“While there was this coming together,” he said, the British were also “making bombs and bombing the Germans as well. People were dying on both sides.” He and McQueen combed the Pathé film archive for documentary and historical footage of Britain’s bomb-making factories.
“We were trying to figure out, what is the process? What’s that person doing with that machine?” Stockhausen said. “What are those wheelbarrows going by with round metal?”
Building a bomb shelter
Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a kindly air raid warden, takes George to a government bomb shelter, in the basement under the Royal Exchange building. With its crisscrossed steel beams, this shelter was designed to look more orderly than the shelter in a poorer part of the city where Rita is volunteering, Stockhausen said.
Though a real bomb shelter still exists as part of the London Transport Museum, the production didn’t end up using it, Stockhausen said, because it was from 1944, and so would not have been accurate to the film’s 1940 setting.
Instead, the production built the government bomb shelter inside a long, narrow shed used for making ropes in Chatham, southeast England.
London’s nightclubs
A flashback telling the story of Rita’s relationship with George’s father, Marcus (CJ Beckford), who is originally from Grenada, takes viewers to a London nightclub. “It was incredibly important to show the not-often-seen reality, that there was this bustling community of color living this kind of life in London at that time,” Stockhausen said.
The film also portrays clubbing during the Blitz, at the storied Café de Paris in London’s West End, and a performance by the musician and dancer Ken “Snakehips” Johnson (played by Devon McKenzie-Smith). The real-life Johnson was killed in an explosion when the Café de Paris was bombed in 1941.
During the Blitz period, London “was dark and quiet on the streets, but there’s all this life that’s just been pushed below the surface,” said Stockhausen of the club scene that thrived underground. From a design perspective, that contrast was “fascinating,” he added.
A burning bridge
Though the film takes place against a backdrop of air raids, explosions are used sparingly. The production planned two major scenes involving fire: the film’s opening sequence, and a scene in which George runs along the River Thames and away from a burning London Bridge, down into the bowels of an underground station.
“In this moment of desperation for George, it was important to see the scale of the devastation,” Stockhausen said.
The fire was created at Chatham Dockyard, a former naval facility in east England. “You can’t do this on the streets of any city, London or anywhere,” Stockhausen said. “You can’t do this level of fire and not risk people’s lives.” The production took over one row of real buildings and created a wooden facade on the other side of the street, which was what they set on fire.
Sheltering inside underground stations
As bombs fall outside, George shelters inside London Bridge underground station, which is crammed with other civilians. To give the illusion of a bigger space, the production constructed the station’s train tracks and its tunnel on a curve.
The team also had to make George’s odyssey into London’s underground Tube system feel like a journey in which the audience, too, could get a little lost. “The L ondon Underground is much, much deeper than the New York City subway system,” Stockhausen said, and to emphasize this, the crew built a set of escalators.
How to flood a station
In October 1940, a bomb hit the street above Balham underground station, causing a bus to crash into the cratered road and rupturing a water main. The ensuing flood of water killed nearly 70 people who were sheltering inside the underground station. The disaster inspired a similar flood in “Blitz.”
Ordinarily, to create a flood scene, a set would be built inside a kind of giant swimming pool that the production could fill and drain at will. But “in London, there isn’t a tank big enough” to flood the station set, Stockhausen said, and neither was there on the soundstage the production was using.
So the supervising art director Oli van der Vijver and the construction manager Dan Marsden built the underground set on a dry stage, and then turned it into a fish tank. “We thought, ‘We’ll waterproof it completely, and add an absolute mountain of steel outside of it, to take the pressure of the water, and we’ll hope the whole thing holds water and doesn’t blow apart,’” Stockhausen said.
On the first day of filming the scene, as the special effects supervisor Hayley Williams used a pump system to flood the space, the risk it wouldn’t hold was “terribly scary,” Stockhausen said.
Making a floodable set rather than dunking a set in a floodable tank “was a completely inside-out way to think about it,” he said. “But in the end, it really worked.”
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