Interview with Michael Apted
56Up, the eighth instalment in the Up series, hit cinemas in the US last week. Offering a snapshot of the life of fourteen people every seven years, the series is widely regarded as the first of its kind, paving the way for shows like Child of Our Time. Invited to Sheffield Doc/Fest this year to give a talk about his career, most importantly his work on the Up series, director and series co-founder Michael Apted took some time out of his hectic schedule to discuss his career with us.
You work both in documentary and fiction film. What is it about documentary that particularly appeals to you?
Well I think in some ways that’s where I started. I think that’s what my soul is – I’ve got a documentary soul. Even when I do movies I try and approach it slightly as a documentary – if it’s about something that’s real, or something that pretends to be real, I try to find out what the truth is. I think my instincts are documentarian, so that’s why I like coming back and doing them and exercising those muscles.
How were you involved with the Up series in the first place, and how has that involvement changed since it began?
Well, I’d just started at Granada [the television company]. Me and another trainee, Gordon MacDougall, were sent off with a Canadian director to find a group of seven-year-old kids to make a film about whether the English class system was changing or whether it was just cosmetic, The Beatles and all that sort of stuff. It was only ever going to be one film, a World in Action special. Then, when it came out it was very successful, because it had a kind of innocence to it and it was funny, but it did also seem to have some frightening truths about the class system. Still, the penny didn’t drop for some time. It wasn’t until four or five years after it came out that we got the idea of ‘why don’t we go back and see what’s happened to them?’. Once we did that then we could see that we had a big idea going, and then it wasn’t really such a tough thing. I went to live and work in America after I’d done 21, but I vowed that I would come back and do this. No-one believed it, but I did! It’s such a valuable thing, such a valuable part of my working life.
I imagine the Sixties as a time when people thought there would be really big changes coming about. Is the world today anything like how you think people might have envisaged it back then?
I can’t imagine it… I can’t even put myself back that far! All I know – and it’s a slightly damaging thing for us – is that we chose ten boys and four girls. We were a fairly forward-thinking group, but it was considered inconceivable that women could have such a major role in society. It’s a sorry thing, because I like to say that the biggest revolution in my lifetime has been the changing role of women, and we missed that. But I can’t beat myself – we didn’t deliberately set out to miss it, it just wasn’t there on the landscape. So that’s one way in which people would find it difficult, if you put yourself back fifty years, to imagine England now. In other ways, I really don’t know!
Is it hard not to pick favourites amongst the participants, to be objective?
It may be, but I don’t think so. I mean, it’s a strange relationship – it’s like a family. I see some of them between films, some of them I don’t. Some of them I get on with well, some I don’t. Well, not that I don’t get on with them but I don’t see them… It’s more than a professional relationship; it’s kind of a blood relationship. I don’t think I have favourites. I have people I get on with easier – I find it easier to talk to some than to others. The key thing I’ve learnt doing it is that you’ve got to – if it’s humanly possible – every time you start a new one, have a blank slate. Not to go in with a lot of preconceptions, not remembering what they said at the last one so they’ll say something about it this time. To really make it a genuine snapshot of their lives now. That’s quite difficult to do, to really clear your mind out. That’s definitely part of my agenda, if I have favourites, not to show my hand. I feel the films are stronger the less I impose my will on it, the less I try and direct it. The more I let them run it, the better it is. I don’t want it to be, in a subtle way, about me.
How do you feel about the things which have followed on from Up? Now we have Child of Our Time, The Simpsons have parodied it…
The greatest honour! I think it’s wonderful. We, I suppose, invented it. We didn’t sit down and invent it, it just happened organically and sort of by accident, but film is so great for marking the passage of time, it’s so much richer than reading a book to see images of a period. I’m thrilled that people have picked it up and it’s become a genre – longitudinal documentaries have become part of the documentary landscape. It’s quite frightening to think that one was in at the beginning of that!
A little morbid this one – how do you feel you’re related to the series? Could it continue after your death?
I would hope so… whether it would or not I don’t know. I also hope – and this is also a bit morbid! – that I go first. The thought of one of them going, and how one deals with all that, is a pretty chilling thought… I hope it would go on after me, I hope it would survive.
You have a kind of double life as documentary filmmaker and movie maker. A film I really love is your 90s medical thriller Extreme Measures…
Oh! Good for you!
What are your memories of making it, and how do you feel about it?
Well, it didn’t do very well! It’s very odd, sometimes you really warm to the films that don’t do very well, and the ones that do very well you kind of toss them off. I always have a soft spot for films that I think got poorly treated or didn’t come out at the right time… it wasn’t in the air. I remember Gorky Park came out and no-one was interested, but then a year, two years later we had the Berlin Wall down and Gorbachev and all that. On the other hand I did Coal Miner’s Daughter and at that very moment some country music entered the mainstream and we had Willy Nelson, Dolly Parton… With one I was lucky, the other I was unlucky. With a film like Extreme Measures, people were pretty harsh on it. I think people had a lot against Hugh [Grant, who played the lead] and Elizabeth [Hurley, who produced, and was in a high-profile relationship with Grant]. I think we got caught up in that media spiral.
We like Hugh Grant in the film. Did you particularly try and work against the kind of performance he was known for?
Well, we both did. We knew it had to be real – it still always benefitted from his unique form of wit, but we could never turn it into a kind of Four Weddings turn. I did a film with John Belushi, and asked the audience to treat him as a straight actor and a romantic actor, in Continental Divide. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t – sometimes an audience is disappointed that the actor doesn’t present the usual ‘menu’, sometimes audiences are surprised and delighted by it. It’s a real risk for actors who change course.
Did you spend time making sure things made medical sense?
Sure. That was easy. What was difficult was spending time underground! We shot quite a bit of the film underground. The tunnel stuff was real. We built the emergency room, but the tunnel was real stuff. No fun, I can tell you! Underground with all these rats, oh my God, wondering what you were going to trip over. I don’t find many people who bring that film up, so I’m thrilled!
You also directed Pierce Brosnan’s third Bond film, The World is Not Enough. How was it stepping into something as huge as the Bond franchise?
Well, it was scary at first. Not just stepping into a well-oiled machine, but stepping into a group of people who’d worked together a lot… and also for me it was the biggest physical film I had ever done by a long way. Early on when we were preparing the film, I thought ‘I’m never going to do this!’ but a little voice in my head said ‘pay attention!’. If someone’s here in front of you to do a set that you won’t shoot for six months, pay attention. That was the key – six months later they showed up and I knew what we were doing. The whole scale of it was so intimidating before you started shooting. At the beginning I was petrified by it, but they were very, very nice people. They were gracious and welcoming. They allowed me to bring in some of my own people, and some of their people I very much wanted. It was a very happy marriage.
The World is Not Enough was one of the last ‘trad’ Bond films. How do you feel about the reinvention of the series from Casino Royale onwards?
Well, the jury is out… The films make more and more money but they also cost more money. It’s interesting to see the range that they can bring to Daniel’s [Craig] Bond. I thought the great thing about Pierce was the range of his acting because he was a genuine matinee idol as well as a good action actor… Connery had those varied abilities and I think that’s the key to it, to make sure that Bond never becomes one-note, that he has to have a variety of skills.
More recently you made The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in 3D. How do you feel about 3D? Was it your choice?
Well, it was the studio – we shot it in 2D. It was the same studio that did Avatar and I had actually almost delivered my cut, in February 2010, before they decided to do it in 3D. It was a tremendous pressure on us because we had 1400, 1500 visual effects shots all planned out and suddenly the whole post-production was compressed because you have to finish the visual effects shots before you can deal with the 3D on them. I thought it was… It was a good business decision, I think the film made more money because of it – the 3D paid for itself – but it wasn’t much fun doing it that way.
Are you still tied to the series? Will they be doing The Magician’s Nephew?
I don’t think so… it’s hard to say. There had historically been a bad atmosphere between the CS Lewis estate and Walden and between Disney and Fox [Disney produced the first two and Fox the third]. I don’t think they can even decide, frankly, which book to do next. They should have been writing the next script when I was doing Dawn Treader, but when you think that I started in 2008 and they still can’t decide which book to do, that doesn’t speak to a very fertile partnership there, but who knows?
Would you have advice for people wanting to get into documentary or movie-making now, and is there any advice you ever received in your life that stuck with you?
I think it’s the same piece of advice, really, which is to do it! It was harder in my time because the technology wasn’t so flexible and so available. I remember meeting a great hero of mine when I was at university, Peter Brook, the stage director [of Mahabharata fame], and asked that question and he said ‘just do it, do it on a street corner, direct things, do it’. In this day and age you do have the technology, you can, at no great expense, write a script and go out and do it with your friends, and a number of people have already come through that door. It’s difficult because the business is contracting, but you can, as a young person, create your own calling card. I think if you have the will and the energy to do it, that’s the thing to do.