It was a single photograph that started Oscar-winning filmmaker Steve McQueen on the journey to making “Blitz.” As a Londoner, the German bombing of the city during World War II is never far from his mind. Reminders are everywhere.

But the spark of inspiration came from an image of a little boy on a train platform with a large suitcase. Stories inspired by the evacuation are not uncommon, but this child was black. Who was he, McQueen wondered, and what was his story?

The film, in theaters Friday and streaming on Apple TV+ on November 22, tells the story of George, a 9-year-old mixed-race child from East London whose life with his mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), and his grown-up -father is upset by the war. Like many children at the time, he was put on a train to go to the countryside for his safety. But he goes downstairs and begins a long, dangerous journey back to his mother, encountering all sorts of people and situations that paint a revealing and emotional picture of this moment.

SEARCHING FOR GEORGE AND FINDING A STAR

When McQueen finished the script, he thought, “Not bad.” Then he started to worry: Does George exist? Is there anyone capable of playing this role? Through open casting, they found Elliott Heffernan, a 9-year-old living just outside London whose only experience was a school play. He was Aladdin’s genie.

“There was a calmness about him, a real silent movie star quality,” McQueen said. “You wanted to know what he was thinking and you leaned in. That’s the quality of a movie star: a presence in his absence.”

Elliott is now 11 years old. When he was cast, he hadn’t yet heard about the evacuation and imagined that a film set would consist of “around 100 people.” But he quickly found his feet, dropping in and out of little vignettes throughout George’s odyssey with stunts, slaps and everything in between. Elliott, for his part, preferred days with waterfalls.

“It’s just more exciting,” Elliott said.

While his on-screen mother and co-star, Ronan, who well remembers the strange experience of being a child on a film set, took him under her wing. Now, not only is he receiving praise for his performance, but he’s already booked another movie (although he can’t talk about it yet). Another bonus: he thoroughly impressed his teachers with his knowledge of World War II.

BUT CAN SHE SING?

Ronan told her agent she wanted to take a break after “The Outrun,” with one caveat: Steve McQueen. “He said, ‘Well, on that…’” Ronan laughed.

“I was really excited about the idea that the love story that was going to exist in this kind of war epic would be about a child and his mother,” Ronan said. “It was a story set in World War II that was going to stay on the ground. It was going to focus on the communities back home and the ongoing war they faced every day when they left their homes.

But McQueen needed a singer and Ronan was an unknown. They hired a vocal coach to visit her on set where she was filming in Australia.

“I’ll never forget, I got a call saying, ‘Steve, not only can she sing, but it’s only going to get better,'” McQueen said. “I was very happy to call her back and say, ‘you got this’.”

Ronan and Elliott would sing alongside Paul Weller, the English rock star from Jam and Style Council, in his first acting role as George’s kindly grandfather. Rita also gets a solo feature in the original song “Winter Coat”, written by Nicholas Britell and Taura Stinson and inspired by McQueen’s late father. She performs it on a live radio broadcast at the munitions factory where she works.

The backbone of war

Showing this munitions factory was important for “Blitz.” In war films, women are not often in the forefront. When they are, McQueen said, it’s a wife or girlfriend crying, someone offering a cup of tea. It wasn’t reality, he knew it.

“Women (were) the emotional and physical backbone of the war,” he said. “They were dealing with their aging parents. They took care of the evacuation of the children. And then they would go to a munitions factory to make missiles and to airplane hangars to make planes. »

USING THE CONVENTIONAL TO SHOW THE UNCONVENTIONAL

Some critics have called McQueen’s “Blitz” the most conventional or traditional film. According to him, this is not the main thing.

“There are classic tropes, there is a classic situation. For lack of a better word, it’s a Brothers Grimm fairy tale to some extent,” he said. “But what he shows is totally revolutionary. It’s about using the conventional to show what is unconventional.

It means taking audiences to a place they’ve never been: Stepney Green tube station, where east Londoners sheltered from the bombs; the munitions factory; the chic Café de Paris, where another class of Londoners enjoy oysters and champagne to the sound of the house band playing “Oh Johnny” while the bombs fall; and the tube shelter where a flood killed 66 people.

“Blitz” also introduces audiences to people they probably haven’t heard of: Mickey Davies (played by Leigh Gill), a man known as “Mickey the Dwarf” who transformed the Spitalfields Fruit and Wool Exchange into refuge; and Ife (Benjamin Clementine), a Nigerian air raid warden who befriends George, who was also inspired by a real person.

Everything in “Blitz” is taken from historical facts. And most of it is seen through the eyes of a black child. George, McQueen said, is not Oliver Twist.

“It’s like comparing myself to Prince Harry,” McQueen said. “Like, really?” But it has to do with something else. It’s whatever it is. But the reality is that I’m interested in images and stories that have never been told before.

SEE LONDON DIFFERENTLY

Ronan doesn’t live too far from East London and often remembers the past in mundane ways every day. The candle park where everyone walks their dog? That’s only because the rows of houses were destroyed, she said. But like everyone else, she came away from “Blitz” with an even greater appreciation for her adopted community and her neighbors, some of whom have lived in their home their entire lives.

“There’s a real commitment to this place,” she said. “Knowing that it still exists in London in small pockets means you’re sort of there to honor someone’s history.”

For McQueen, it was an important experience to know and tell stories we hadn’t yet heard, just as he did with Solomon Northup in the Academy Award-winning “12 Years a Slave.”

“The Blitz is something that we put a lot of our national identity on, you know, the spirit of the Blitz and who we are and so on, our finest hours and all that stuff,” he said . “What interested me was to enlighten those who were missing from the conversation. When I look at London now, I feel very proud. I’m very proud of all the contributions of these people and of the film: that we allowed people to see themselves.

GO FOR THE HEART

McQueen doesn’t lose sleep over the big set pieces: the flood, the fire, the destruction of the Café de Paris. But he worries about the emotion that comes from it.

“Cinema is about the heart,” he said. “What gave me sleepless nights was creating love and having people feel it and it was palpable in the family… This film, ultimately, is about love. LOVE.”

Film festival audiences reacted as they hoped. Soon everyone will have the chance to take this journey with George.

“It got a very visceral reaction from people,” McQueen said. “I think in London and New York there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. That’s what cinema can do and that’s what I wanted. It’s as much about the audience: we can see ourselves through the eyes of a child.”