A city pounded by bombs exploding after dark. A small boy, defiant of his mother’s attempt to send him to safety in the countryside, roaming the streets in a desperate attempt to reach home safely, while his frantic mother searches for him. If there is one thing that Blitz is not short on, it is dramatic tension.

       Which is no more nor less than we’ve come to expect from master storyteller Steve McQueen. The World War II drama will premiere at the London Film Festival on October 9.

McQueen known for such powerhouse movies as Hunger in 2008, Shame in 2011, and the Golden Globe-winning 12 Years A Slave in 2013, as well as television’s taut 2020 racial anthology Small Axe.

       “If a movie is not entertaining, it’s not going to be any good,” he told me once at a  Golden Globes conference. “First and foremost it’s got to be good storytelling. It’s like two guys in a bar telling the same story – one will send you to sleep, and the other one will keep you on the edge of your seat. As a filmmaker,  I want to be the person who’s keeping you on the edge of your seat. And, for me, that’s all about the story.

“It’s been going on from the beginning of time — people will sit around a campfire and someone will tell a story. And the story has to grab you from the beginning, otherwise there’s no point.”

       In many ways, he has movies in his blood. Born in London in 1969 to a Grenadian mother and a Bajan father, he says he was called Steve McQueen after the coolest movie star of the day. “1969 was the year when everyone was talking about Bullitt,’” he says of the uber-1960s crime action drama starring the actor who is his namesake. “And when my Mum was in the maternity hospital, the baby was at the end of the bed, very old-fashioned. My name was originally Stephen, but when the nurses would walk by and see my name, they’d all say, ‘So how’s Steve McQueen doing?’ My Mum would say ‘His name’s not Steve!’ But eventually it became Steve and it was all because of Bullitt”!

       Although he spends much of his time in Amsterdam where he has a home with his wife, Dutch film director and occasional collaborator on his own films Bianca Stigter, it quickly becomes plain that London hold a special place in his heart.

“I grew up in London in a multi-cultural environment. ‘Cause in Ealing, where I grew up, it was very Polish, and very Irish, and then there were us and we are West Indian. I have friends from Poland and I have friends from Greece and I have friends from Italy and I have friends from Africa and I have friends from every corner of the world – you can see it in my school photograph, that is where I grew up.

“I was very lucky with my background because there were no barriers as far as backgrounds are concerned it was just the norm, it was normal.”

       Blitz is already receiving awards buzz, particularly for the performances of Elliott Heffernan, who plays the main character, 9-year-old George, and supporting contender Saoirse Ronan as his mother. Ask McQueen about this and he only shrugs. 

“I don’t think about it. I don’t think scientists go about trying to do the best work that can because they might win the Nobel prize for medicine. They do it because it’s for humanity’s sake. And to me, as an artist, that’s it. It’s for humanity, my own humanity, and it’s to share, it’s to find the answer to a question. And, that’s the passion, you’re interested in those things. That’s why I do it.”