Steve McQueen reveals how he managed to flood an entire tube station for his new wartime movie

Steve McQueen flooded an entire tube station for his new movie 'Blitz'.

The 55-year-old director is at the helm of the historical drama film that stars Saoirse Ronan as the mother of an adventurous young boy during the height of World War II and, in what he called a "real engineering feat" managed to bring an underground disaster to the screen.

He told Collider: "When I was writing it I thought, 'Well, how are we gonna film the flooding on the underground?'

" And then I couldn't wait to do the dance sequences because they were so joyous! But, you know what was interesting? Both were joyous. Both were fantastic because you can't believe that you've done certain things and you're there. When you're there, new ideas come about, new circumstances come about. So, at first, maybe there's some trepidation because you think, “Okay, well, how are we gonna do that?” But when you're on the set, it's like, “Oh, this is fantastic.”

"My mother always said to take one day at a time. I used to get really frustrated with that, but it is like one of those situations. When you’re actually there, it's actually not as bad as you may feel. Or it's better than you think most of the time, hopefully.

"So Adam Starkey, the art director, built the tube station, and it was amazing because, again, how do you flood a station? It was a real engineering feat — the water and how we replenished the water and so forth."

The Academy Award-winning movie maker noted that there was a lot of potential "chaos" that could have occurred on set but thanks to several months of preparation, everything came out "right" in the end.

He said: "And the extras, you can imagine the chaos that could have happened, but it was really well organized. People walked into the set and couldn't believe it. It was one of those things where it was obviously a really important set piece in the film, and we had to get it right. It was a lot of months and months of planning, and I'm very excited for people to see it.

'Blitz' streams on Apple+ from November 22.