‘Blitz’: Read The Screenplay For Steve McQueen’s World War II Drama That Started From A Single Photograph

Patrick Hipes

5 December 2024 at 3:30 pm·3-min read

‘Blitz’: Read The Screenplay For Steve McQueen’s World War II Drama That Started From A Single Photograph

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series highlighting the scripts behind the year’s buzziest awards-season films continues with Steve McQueen’s Blitz, a searing period action drama that imagines one story of a million during The Blitz, when Nazi Germany bombed the UK for eight straight months during World War II.

Written and directed by the Oscar-winning McQueen, Apple Original Films’ Blitz had its world premiere as the opening movie of the BFI London Film Festival and closed the New York Film Festival before hitting theaters November 1. It debuted on Apple TV+ on November 22.

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The plot follows the epic journey of George (Elliott Heffernan), a 9-year-old boy in World War II London whose mother Rita (Saoirse Ronan) sends him to safety in the English countryside amid the bombing. George, defiant and determined to return home, embarks on an adventure, only to find himself in immense peril, while a distraught Rita searches for her missing son.

Paul Weller, the frontman of iconic bands The Jam and The Style Council, makes his acting debut in the pic, which also stars Harris Dickinson, Benjamin Clementine, Kathy Burke and Stephen Graham.

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McQueen says he had been thinking of making a movie about The Blitz since the early 2000s. “It was constantly on my mind, but it was only when I discovered a photograph while researching my anthology film series ‘Small Axe’ that I finally found a way in,” he says. “It was an image of a small Black boy standing on a train platform with a large suitcase. That image stayed with me in an almost omnipresent ghostly way, and I continued to find myself wondering who this child was, what was his story during the Blitz?”

Working with historical advisor Joshua Levine, who had previously collaborated with Christopher Nolan on another Word War II epic, Dunkirk, McQueen meticulously researched the era as the script took shape. Among the feats was re-creating London’s luxe underground nightclub Café de Paris, which in real life was hit by a bomb on March 8, 1941. The scene in the movie shows the house band, led by Ken “Snakehips” Johnson, playing “Oh Johnny” as a bomb fell through the ceiling — that was the actual song playing at the time. Thirty-four people were killed.

Also based on real events was a scene depicting a flooded tube station; in reality, a Nazi bomb fell on the road above Balham station the night of October 14, 1940, as people had gathered to sleep inside to hide from the shelling. A total of 66 were killed, with one survivor a young boy who managed to escape through a locked gate to get help. That became George’s story in the movie.

The result with Blitz is a snapshot of a harrowing time in British history that McQueen says “in many ways yielded the elemental stiff-upper-lip constitution that permeates our national psyche to this day.”

Read McQueen’s script here:

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