Sir Steve McQueen flooded an entire tube station for his new film Blitz, for a heart-in-mouth sequence.
The 55-year-old director helms the historical drama film that stars Saoirse Ronan as the mother of a young boy during the height of World War Two, who rebels against evacuating from his home in Stepney Green, London.
In what he called a ‘real engineering feat’ the Oscar-winning filmmaker managed to bring an underground disaster to the screen, which was inspired by real-life events.
Runaway George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan) is alone in London for large parts of the film, struggling to find his way back while encountering a host of other characters trying to survive the dangers on the home front.
‘When I was writing it, I thought, “Well, how are we gonna film the flooding on the underground?”,’ he told Collider.
While he may have felt daunted by that sequence, he ended up finding it equally as ‘joyous’ and ‘fantastic’ as the dance scenes – which he was looking forward to – because ‘you can’t believe that you’ve done certain things and you’re there’.
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‘When you’re there, new ideas come about, new circumstances come about. So, at first, maybe there’s some trepidation because you think, “Okay, well, how are we gonna do that?” But when you’re on the set, it’s like, “Oh, this is fantastic,”’ he added.
The 12 Years A Slave director revealed that he tried to follow his mother’s advice of ‘take one day at a time’ in the run-up to the tube flooding scene, which used to get him ‘really frustrated’.
However, he noted that in his experience, these challenging days were ‘actually not as bad’ when they come around and are ‘better than you think most of the time’.
‘So Adam Starkey, the art director, built the tube station, and it was amazing because, again, how do you flood a station? It was a real engineering feat – the water and how we replenished the water and so forth,’ he shared.
McQueen, 55, noted that there was a lot of potential ‘chaos’ that could have occurred on set but thanks to several months of preparation, everything came out ‘right’ in the end.
‘People walked into the set and couldn’t believe it. It was one of those things where it was obviously a really important set piece in the film, and we had to get it right. It was a lot of months and months of planning, and I’m very excited for people to see it.’
Blitz delves into the problems Londoners had during Nazi Germany’s brutally consistent bombing campaign of 1940-41, before tube stations were officially designated as air raid shelters.
Scared residents naturally headed there to as the safest place they could think of, to wait out the offensive on the tube platforms or even the rail tracks, as shown in Blitz.
However, being that deep under the surface came with its own threats, as the terrifying flood scene shows in Blitz – and it’s something that happened in real life too.
On October 14, 1940, Balham tube station was bombed, creating a large crater in the road outside into which a London double decker bus crashed.
The explosion also fractured water mains and sewers above the deep underground station, meaning water flowed into the station, leaving approximately 66 dead – many from drowning – and more than 70 injured.
Blitz is in select cinemas now, and its streaming release on Apple TV+ is from November 22.
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