‘I’m not a cartoon illustrator, I’m a filmmaker,’ states Steve McQueen, with typical confidence, when we speak over Zoom. He’s a lot more than a filmmaker, of course. A Turner Prize-winning artist, for starters. And a knight of the realm since 2020. But it’s through his movies he’s best known. Starting with 2008’s Hunger, about life in the Maze Prison during the 1981 IRA hunger strikes, McQueen brought his distinct visual eye to emotive subjects.

His second film Shame (2011) cast Michael Fassbender as a sex addict living out his pain in New York, but it was his third, the 2014 historical drama 12 Years A Slave, that truly announced him to Hollywood, winning Best Picture at the Oscars. More recently, after remaking British TV show Widows (2018) in Chicago, McQueen has returned to Europe, beginning with his BBC-backed Small Axe TV anthology, which powerfully examined the lives of West Indian immigrants in London across five films.

It’s here where McQueen has stayed for his latest feature, Blitz, a picaresque World War II drama that takes place in 1940 at the height of the Luftwaffe’s air raids on London. Amid dizzying shots of the city being bombed, Saoirse Ronan plays Rita, a factory worker and single mother who faces the prospect of her boy George (Elliott Heffernan) being evacuated. ‘That’s the thing about this movie,’ notes McQueen. ‘It’s about the intimacy as well as the epic set pieces. It’s got to be. It’s got to be hugely emotional as well as hugely spectacular.’

When I ask McQueen what wartime movies he responds to, he shrugs. ‘I wasn’t interested in World War II stories; I was interested in a movie. The fact that this fits in some sort of genre, fine. But for me, what was interesting is that like no other World War picture, as far as I’m aware, you don’t see the enemy. Do you see a soldier? I wanted to focus on the individuals who had survived the narrative, rather than people in khakis somewhere in France fighting.’

Speaking as passionately as he does rapidly, McQueen is the sort of director who is fully engaged with his subject. ‘You can’t detach yourself,’ he insists. ‘You have to be really embedded in it.’ His last work, 2023’s four-hour documentary Occupied City, also took on the conflict, as he turned the lens onto his adopted city of Amsterdam, where he lives with his wife Bianca Stigter. While that film was based on the book Atlas Of An Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940–1945 by Stigter, Blitz comes more from McQueen’s imagination and his days growing up in London, where he’d look up and see vacant, bombed-out buildings.

Additionally, in 2003, he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to create artworks as the Iraq conflict broke out. Ultimately, he produced Queen And Country, commemorating British soldiers killed in Iraq by presenting their portraits as a sheet of stamps. But McQueen was also inspired by his own parents (his mother is from Grenada, his father from Barbados) who migrated to London after World War II; ‘invited’, as he puts it, to help rebuild a country torn apart by six years of conflict.

All of this coalesced in McQueen’s mind as he wrote Blitz, a film that strives to show a diverse and very different portrait of London in this period. Underground jazz clubs feature, as does a Nigerian air-raid warden Ife (Benjamin Clementine), based on a real-life character. ‘When I was researching for Small Axe, I found this image of a boy, a black child who was standing on a railway station with an oversized coat and a large suitcase. And that was the thing that sparked in my head, as far as the character of George is concerned.’

The product of a brief fling Ronan’s character Rita has with a young black man she meets in one of those jazz clubs, George is subjected to prejudice almost routinely through the film, especially from white boys his own age. According to McQueen, he was simply ‘reciting the realities of the day’, and not just for those whose skin colour was different. ‘I mean, there’s a lot of anti-Semitism in England at that time,’ he says. ‘And again, the women did not have a great time either... it’s just how it was.’

While the enemy comes from within, Blitz aims to be more a celebration of those who weren’t on the frontlines but were fighting on the home front; in particular, women like Rita who came together to make munitions to fight the Nazis. ‘I wanted to shine light on what they did during that time. I was really honoured to do that... it was something which happened and had been neglected, but obviously it’s very, very important.’

What McQueen does well in Blitz is show the wartime spirit, especially through Rita, who entertains her fellow workers by singing. ‘You’d be very surprised what people do during wartime. I think what was interesting for me was the music in Blitz and discovering and finding out how we, as humans, adapt to most things, and how music was such a part of a survival tactic; that camaraderie, that jovial collective singing. If it’s in a pub or if it’s in a shelter: song made things a bit better.’ In keeping with this, McQueen made the unusual step of casting musician Paul Weller as Rita’s father, Gerald. The former frontman of The Jam is often seen, in the film, noodling away at a piano, although the director was more visually drawn to him. ‘I just thought of Paul and his face. He’s someone who I admire, and I thought to myself “well, if someone could write a song and perform it, they can act. They should be able to act.” I just asked him. And I don’t think he was up for it at first, but somehow I convinced him. His face is so amazing; such a sensitive man.’

Likewise, the four-time Oscar nominee Ronan, currently enjoying a stellar career moment with Orkney-set The Outrun, was a perfect foil. Her authenticity drew McQueen in. ‘I think that’s the most important thing for people looking at someone acting on the screen, that you believe her. There’s no doubt. There’s no “oh, she’s acting. Oh, isn’t she a great actress?” I’m looking forward to seeing more of her work, because she just goes straight into the heart of things, and you’re there with her.’

When it came to casting George, McQueen found Heffernan who had never acted before. ‘What was great with Paul and Saoirse and Elliott, is that all three of them really bonded. They really loved each other. They really appreciated and respected each other. So these generations of a nine-year-old, a 29-year-old and a 66-year-old; they’re these three generations but they really bonded. That’s why the family thing was so strong because they really liked hanging out with each other.’

The project seems to have left McQueen in a blissful state. ‘I was exhausted with happiness. I was making a movie about a subject that I was passionate about, with people I loved. I was making a British epic, and these things hardly ever happen. If they happen... what do they call it? Out Of Africa or A Passage To India. The fact that I can make a picture and attempt an epic one about ordinary people made me so happy.’

Blitz is in cinemas from Friday 1 November and on Apple TV+ from Friday 22 November.