Steve McQueen is touched by my concern. “Lord help us, you have to be frightened when a journalist is scared for you!” The idea makes him smile. And no, the acclaimed artist and filmmaker does not seem in obvious danger, sipping coffee in London’s Soho. He is here in good spirits with a new movie to discuss: Blitz, a portrait of the city wracked by the 1940-41 Nazi bombing campaign. It is breathtaking cinema: urgent even for a director whose work so often meets the moment, and in some ways, his most personal film.
It also takes on enough sacred cows that, eventually, McQueen does admit a certain sense of risk. “But if risk comes with the truth, let it be a risk.”
Anyone who knows the UK will know too the role of the Blitz in the national psyche: a triumph of mass endurance in the face of the abyss. Now 55, McQueen recalls encountering that cultural memory as a child in 1970s London, by now pared down to core images. “Churchill’s cigar. St Paul’s still standing. Smiling faces sheltering on Tube platforms.” Soon, he also heard of the “Blitz spirit”, the phrase with which later Britons would be urged by press and politicians to cope with crisis as their forebears did: chipper in the rubble, uncomplainingly united.