‘Blitz’ Built and Destroyed Practical Sets Instead of Relying on CGI: ‘We Wanted It to Feel Like a Bomb Had Exploded’

Director Steve McQueen could not have made his latest film “Blitz” without production designer Adam Stockhausen.

McQueen needed him to help tell the story of World War II London as it came under attack from the enemy. He wanted as much as possible to be done in camera, and Stockhausen was just the person to build sets, but also destroy them — and really destroy them.

The atmosphere was an important factor for McQueen, such as the minute details of capturing dust particles floating in the air following a night of heavy bombing or the dirty environment created by people burning coal. McQueen says, “He’s a storyteller first and foremost. A brick wall isn’t just a brick wall, there’s a story behind it. That’s what Adam brings to the table.”

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The two are no strangers to working together. Stockhausen worked with McQueen on “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows.” Honesty and being upfront are two factors McQueen says Stockhausen has to help deliver his vision for the film starring Saoirse Ronan as a mother desperately trying to find her young son, George (Elliott Heffernan). “He’s an artist,” McQueen adds. “I get inspired.”

Stockhausen and McQueen spoke with Variety about approaching their storytelling for the film, which opened in theaters on Friday and lands on Apple TV+ on Nov. 22.

What was one of the first sets you talked about?

ADAM STOCKHAUSEN: It was about the little things and the big things. We talked about the tiniest textures, the wallpaper and wanting their life to be real and viscerally present. We wanted to do it in a real way, not a blue screen that would be painted in later. One of the first sequences I worked on was where George wakes up by the river and starts the run up through the city because it felt like that might be the hardest to do. It was about how to pull that off when George’s run is telling the right story about London, the attack that’s happening. It’s all in camera and in London, not somewhere else. So, we looked at Wapping in East London and piers, but one thing led to another and then we were off and running.

What was important about the family home and the street they live on?

STEVE MCQUEEN: Scale. Those houses are very tight and small. It’s the intimacy of these three people living there; Rita, George and the grandfather. It’s like a nest, and our movie is about a bird that leaves a nest and tries to fly back home. It was interesting to have that scale, from the bedroom and going out into the street to those terraced houses. George had never left his neighborhood. Why would he? By the time you get to St. Paul’s Catherdal and the tube station, so we go from this intimacy and it gets bigger and bigger.

I think what was interesting with Adam was what he did with the scale and the history because everything in London has a story, and I think the detail is the thing that makes the character so it’s believable.

Another sequence that was fascinating to see was the Café Du Paris with the entertainment and nightlife which later is blitzed, what went into building that?

STOCKHAUSEN: That was a great set to do. That was a real event and actually happened. It gave the narrative the possibilities of showing the intensity of the life that was going on underneath the streets while this terrible thing was happening to the city, and life was still there. And then it gives us the 180 degrees from that, the total destruction. The place is real, the more we dug into the better the research we found. The only thing we cheated was the kitchen and where that was relative to the dancefloor.

McQUEEN: That’s the poetry of the piece. I wasn’t interested in explosions. I was interested in the aftermath, the before and after. What’s so beautiful about a lot of these things is building these amazing sets but also destroying them. How do you destroy a set in a way that feels like a bomb has exploded? That’s art, and it’s hard. It’s not just taking a hammer to things, or taking a bulldozer. How are we going to break up this balcony? That’s a conversation. The Cafe de Paris was about limbo, death, and to have life before death. The particles of dust and flashlights, it’s a beautiful thing, the collaboration was wonderful.

STOCKHAUSEN: It was hard for people to shoot too. It was actual rubble and dust. We totally destroyed the thing, but it was a tough one.

What went into the tube stations and building those, or were they locations?

STOCKHAUSEN: This is the place of safety and you want to get to it. There’s fire, there’s craziness and terrible things happening, but we’ve made it down here. We couldn’t do it at a location because we had to flood it, so we built it. But it’s not just that part, we had to build the escalators and connecting tubes and build enough that you felt like there was a world down there.

We put it on a dry stage instead of in a tank because we couldn’t find a tank that was big enough. But there was just a crazy amount of scaffolding tube and steel on the outside of the set to try to brace it for the impact of that huge amount of water that was about to hit it, and we waterproofed it, and we all crossed our fingers and dumped the water.

McQUEEN: What an engineering feat. We wanted to do it for real. And all the stunts were done by Eliott. It was real. We needed it to be real, and we needed it to be tactile. We needed it to be a situation where there was a real connection to what was going on, the action sequence, as well as the emotional. It’s cinema, and I feel very warm hearted that people are connecting with it because it is an odyssey within the journey through London.

What Adam has done is show you London in a way which is never been seen, and how it was. It was a very multicultural landscape.