‘Blitz’ Collaborators Steve McQueen and Adam Stockhausen Are a Match Made in Cinematic Heaven — And It Started with an Unexpected Prop
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“I know where I saw first Adam’s work.”
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Steve McQueen is smiling mischievously as he looks at Adam Stockhausen and I over Zoom. Adam shakes his head. He knows what McQueen’s about to say and offers up a begrudging, if not slightly amused, “Here we go.”
“Where I first saw his work and I thought, ‘This is really good…,'” McQueen couldn’t remember the name of the film, so Stockhausen, loyal collaborator that he is, helped out.
“It’s called ‘The Switch,'” Stockhausen said, ending the suspense. The production designer was referencing an early film in his career, a comedy headlined by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Aniston in which the former ruins the sperm sample the latter intends to use to impregnate herself, forcing him to supply his own specimen in its stead.
“It was the sperm thing,” said McQueen, pointing to it as the first time he noticed Stockhausen’s skills despite not even knowing who he was at the time. “I thought, ‘This is actually brilliant.'”
Taking pride in his craft, Stockhausen said, “I made that myself, with hot glue.”
Seeing McQueen and Stockhausen banter off one another, one is reminded of the dynamic between brothers or cousins who’ve spent too much time around one another, yet can’t manage to be torn apart. Their gifts are not just about what each can do individually, but how they share and influence one another in the pursuit of great art.
“We met each other and we started talking about ’12 Years a Slave’ and I’ll remember that day forever,” said Stockhausen. “We were looking at research together and we just started talking through how we were each seeing the research. Because the thing about looking at research is you can nod and go, ‘Yeah, yeah,’ or you can dive all the way into it and see the way that the ultimate story is gonna be told and start already talking about the final film. We were just off and running immediately and I knew exactly where to go. I left that meeting so incredibly excited about the next steps and how to take them and where we were gonna go together.”
What really impressed McQueen about Stockhausen was not just that he had such a hunger to see his vision through, but to add dimension even while under difficult constraints.
“We were making the 19th century and we had to pay $20 million or less. Crazy. So I think what Adam did in a way was the texture,” McQueen said. “Once you have an idea of the texture, it’s not just surface, it becomes much more believable, it kind of sinks into your pores. I think that’s what Adam’s fantastic at: environments which are lived, rather than seen.”
In addition to working with McQueen, Stockhausen also splits his time designing for Wes Anderson and Steven Spielberg (he’s currently in prep on the maestro’s “Untitled” UFO project). What makes his partnership with the “Blitz” writer/director stand apart is the unique lens through which McQueen sees the world.
“Thinking about ‘Blitz,’ people have made movies about that subject before, about World War II, there’s an existing narrative, and Steve doesn’t see the world in the existing narrative way,” said Stockhausen. “He sees a much more interesting way of looking at the world and therefore this utterly fascinating way of telling stories that is completely wonderful and completely him, I just feel honored to be part of it to be honest.”
While “Blitz” is steeped in adult themes similar to their work on “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows,” it is largely a family film, just one where the act of even being a family is upended by Nazi bombings throughout London. The story follows a young biracial boy named George (newcomer Elliot Heffernan) as he tries to make his way back to his mother (Saoirse Ronan) amidst the various forms of terror the city has to throw at him during this tremulous moment in history. Not only is George forced to face the reality of a city under siege, but also the ongoing battles between cultures that were already present in London before buildings and lives started getting destroyed.
To emphasize this thematic element, McQueen created a scene based off a location Stockhausen provided him with not knowing what it might be used for. It was an old arcade in Hull that had fallen into disrepair, but immediately upon seeing it, McQueen knew it could be re-enlivened to reflect Britain’s own notorious history of imperialism and how it serves as undercurrent for the conflict being brought by the Nazis.
In the scene in “Blitz,” George is wandering the streets when he comes across Empire Arcade, a shopping area featuring a collection of lavish display windows holding various kinds of garments and artifacts from areas colonized by Great Britain. As George gets close to one filled with candies, we see that the treats are set in front of images of slaves working the sugar plantations that made all these delights possible.
“It condensed that narrative in a beautiful way, because these shop windows, they tell you the story,” McQueen said of how Stockhausen helped “scratch an itch” he’d been trying to accomplish with the narrative. He added, “These things were going on at the same time as fighting the Nazis and things were not resolved and I thought that they emphasized it in such a beautiful way and he did a great job.”
Stockhausen was a fan of that design as well, but his biggest accomplishment on “Blitz” was the flooding of the London Circus Underground towards the end of the film. The sequence was based on a real event from the London Blitz that involved a bomb blowing both a sewer and a water pipe, flooding the Bethnal Green Tube Station where people were sheltering and killing 70.
Just as it plays out in the film, McQueen said it was a young boy who managed to swim to safety and seek help for others. To capture this terrifying circumstance, McQueen wanted the camera to actually be in the water with George. This proved complicated as London didn’t have a tank big enough for the underground set Stockhausen had designed, but he was willing to try something new. Supervising art director Oli van der Vijver and construction manager Dan Marsden built the underground set on a dry stage, then turned it into a fish tank by water-proofing its exterior with huge walls of steel.
“We didn’t know if it was going to work and it’s super exciting and fun to be at that point of well, ‘I hope so. We have every confidence this is going to work, but we’ve never done it before.’ We’re all just kind of hoping for the best on a really big scale and that was very satisfying. It’s also such a perfect illustration of what Steve talks about all the time in the importance of really making these things and having a world to work in,” said Stockhausen. “The scene will have more vitality and more reality and more terror if they’re really in the water, if this is really happening, if you can turn around and you’re in the real space that affects the performers and it affects everybody, and that all reads on film.”
To this, McQueen smiled once again, reminded of the day they first flooded the set. “When Adam did it and we put the water in it for the first time, he said, ‘It doesn’t leak,'” McQueen said. “I thought, ‘What were you thinking? You thinking it was gonna leak?'”
They both laughed. Creating together is a lot more fun when you can do so with someone you can poke fun at and it’s clear these two don’t have an issue there. Like two kids playing make believe, McQueen and Stockhausen are the best kind of cinematic counterparts: Boundless and always working towards a deeper truth.
“Blitz” is currently available to stream on Apple TV+.
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