Steve McQueen on His 4-Hour Documentary Epic ‘Occupied City’ and How It’s Informing His Apple TV+ Movie ‘Blitz’
variety.comManori Ravindran Executive Editor of International Steve McQueen looks stressed out. He’s a few weeks into post-production on “Blitz,” his World War II drama for Apple TV+, while starting promotion on his other, long-gestating wartime project, the documentary “Occupied City.” “It’s definitely pleasurable, but this is work,” declares McQueen with the wariness of a filmmaker who’s just been plucked out of the edit suite. “Hard work is always hard work.
You can’t avoid it.” The British director, who was Oscar-nominated for “12 Years a Slave,” didn’t set out to make back-to-back movies about the war, but “you plant seeds, and some come to fruition and others don’t,” he explains. “These two happened to blossom fairly close to each other.” “Blitz,” which stars Saoirse Ronan and Harris Dickinson, is a drama set in London, which was bombed but never occupied by Germany during the war.
In contrast, “Occupied City” — which world premieres on May 17 in Cannes’ Special Screenings section — is a narrated exploration of the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam juxtaposed with images of the present-day city during a COVID-struck year.
The A24-distributed and financed film, which is 4 hours and 22 minutes long and devoid of talking-head interviews or archive footage, is informed by the illustrated book “Atlas of an Occupied City (Amsterdam 1940-1945)” by Dutch author-director Bianca Stigter, who is McQueen’s partner.
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