Famed director Michael Apted is known as much for his longevity as for the breadth and quality of his work. Working since the 1960s, Apted has made, inter alia, Gorillas in the Mist, Nell, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and the Pierce Brosnan James Bond outing The World Is Not Enough.
But his longest-running and best-known project is the perennial Up Series: an installment documentary that began with 13 seven year olds in London and has visited them every seven years since.
If you haven’t seen the Up Series, which Roger Ebert once referred to as the “noblest project in cinema history,” see it. All installments are available on the new subscription-based streaming platform, BritBox.
This fall marks the latest episode. Those precocious seven year old Londoners are now, each, 63 years old.
63 Up will come out November 27, 2019. I’ve seen it, and it’s terrific. (Official trailer.) Like all entries in the series, it’s at times transcendent — as close as we may ever come to a time-lapse of human life. As we watch children grow into adults (and now, nearly, seniors), what sticks out is in some ways to be expected: big life events like partners, marriage, the birth of children, illness, employment, and now, as was inevitable, death. (Which television set we buy, or which cell phone provider we choose, rightly pale into irrelevance in the grand scheme.) As the series has progressed, we have seen the subjects’ life circumstances shaped both by deliberate early choices, and also by stochastic noise. One of the great questions of the Up Series is how, and why, the lives of the upper class kids seem somehow more deliberate. more in line with expectation. The entire series is infused with — indeed, was arguably always designed to expose — the dramatic disparities of the English class system. And for that, we have Michael Apted to thank.
I caught up with Michael Apted for a half hour at the Mill Valley Film Festival on October 8, 2019 (he received an MVFF Award later that day), to chat about how this series came to be, about the unexpected value of law school, and about saving me from certain death.
I wouldn’t have guessed that Apted’s fascination with film began with a rained-out sports class.
APTED: I was always very interested in movies, from the very early day, and quite sophisticated movies. I had the good fortune to go to school right in the middle of London. And so there were all these cinemas and theaters. One of my great moments, it was raining and there were no sports [at school] that day. I lived in the suburbs, so I was going to be waiting for a train anyway. So I was walking down Oxford Street, and there I saw a famous old cinema was showing an Ingmar Bergman film. And I thought, what’s this? So I saw it.
And I thought, holy shit. This is it. It opened the whole world to me.
I also didn’t know Apted went to law school:
APTED: I thought law school would help me achieve what I wanted to achieve, which was a way to get into the human area of problems, and things like that. So much of drama is farce or comic or whatever, nothing wrong with any of that, but sometimes it just gets drowned, being about nothing. I started by reading history, then changed to read law, because I thought I’d get a better sense of the world. Which I did.
HAUS: Were you ever thinking about practicing law?
APTED: No, I was only going to practice law if I couldn’t do what I wanted to do, which was to get into show business. This may sound funny, but I didn’t want to spend my life doing James Bond. You know, it’s fun to do, but it’s not fun to do forever. So I was aware that I could get a wider education than, you know, just doing some flashy films and getting a job in the business.
Interestingly, it was this legal training in part that helped Apted appreciate and ultimately capture the seriousness of European film:
APTED: It was the Europeans who made serious movies, not just fodder for Friday night and that sort of thing. American films at that time, in the sixties, were, you know, cheesecake. The real cinema as I saw it in the sixties was European cinema. European films in the sixties were just breathtaking to me. And I was well tuned into it. I was at Cambridge University, and I lived in London, so between the two places we would get all the European films. I was so lucky in that way.
I was way ahead of everybody else in my generation in looking at European movies, because I had a very good education in English studies and things like that, and I wasn’t either seduced by cowboy films or put off by difficult films.
[By contrast, in England and America at the time there were] some great directors but you know, they never really concerned themselves with society; the thrillers were great and all that, but none of them had a serious side to them at all. And the fact that I’d spent a couple of years doing law, I did have a serious side to it. I’ve never said that before.
HAUS: With that in mind, how did you find yourself making The World is Not Enough?
APTED: I always thought the thing to do was to get some variety in your work, in your life, remind yourself that you can do different things. So I didn’t want to turn my back on James Bond or something like that. Perhaps I should have done, but nonetheless.
On how the Up Series came to be:
APTED: It came to birth strangely. Granada [Television] was all the time pushing it, whether doing interesting adaptations of books, or interesting pop music, everything they did was interesting. So it was a great place to be. We didn’t really realize it at the time. Everything the BBC did and ATV did was old hack.
I had expressed an interest in documentaries, hiding my ultimate interest in drama. They had this idea of making a film with seven year old children, ‘show me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man.’
Granada wanted to do a season of very classy English drama, and they hired three guys from Canada, Paul Almond was one of them. And then suddenly I got a visit from the manager to ask, would I like to go and help Paul on his program. I didn’t know this at the time, but it was clear quite quickly that he hadn’t a clue about the English class system or anything like that. But he was a very good drama director, and could tell a story. He made it beautifully, but I gave it, in my little way, much more substance to it, and much more balls to it.
HAUS: Was there always the intention of going back and seeing the kids again?
APTED: No, not at all. This is a long story, my friend. [Laughs] So we did it. And the earth moved. The country went mad. Everything. It was a great moment in English television. Seven Up, as it was called, was something different. And then life went on. Five years later—
[Fabric photo backdrop beside us blows over.]
I’ve saved you from death. That just fell down.
HAUS: Well thank you for that. I’ll just write that you saved me from death.
APTED: Yes, just thank me for your life. [Laughs]
Anyway, so, we did the film. And I was in a reasonable way very helpful. My mother was born with socialism in her tits. And I completely understood everything that was fucked up about British politics. A lot of that appeared in the film. Granada loved it. So that’s how I got it, and although I went on to do other things, I put my big fat foot into the world of documentaries, versus the more routine world of doing Coronation Street and stuff like that. So that was how it happened.
Granada got me again and said we want to do 14 Up. I said I’d love to do it. So I did it and the rest was history, really. I followed the thing all the way through. Every episode, all the way through.
And from then on, I said to them, look, I don’t want to stay at Granada. I want to go to America, work on movies there, television there. But I’ll tell you this – this is after I’d done a week of 14 Up – I said, if you carry on with this, which I think you have to do, I promise that I will show up every seven years to do it. And I did. And that was that.
We made lots of fortuitous but brilliant decisions: Not to do it all the time, but every seven years – people sort of forget it and then they see it and think, oh my God, this is what’s happened.
But I could see the richness of it on day three of the second episode [14 Up]. I mean holy fucking shit. We didn’t have enough working class people, but we had enough people in it to be showing how idiotic the English class system was. So we didn’t screw it up. But nonetheless we were on the edge of screwing it up, so I had to bring it along a bit, find ways to put other people in it, like using the wives and the husbands.
It wouldn’t be a Parsing Haus review without some meta-analysis:
HAUS: The punctuated, every-seven-year format is fascinating. Say I go back and watch The World Is Not Enough today. Everyone in it is the same age they were when they made it, but I’m much older than I was. But the Up Series is almost like participatory cinema: Everyone is getting older with you as you watch it. It’s really something unique.
APTED: Unusual, yes.
HAUS: Watching it, I’ve always felt that this program is as much tied to you as it is to the subjects.
APTED: Well, yeah. I did hold it together by going back every seven years. I had quite a successful career when I went to the BBC in London and then to America, so my enthusiasm to keep it going was helpful. I’m sure they still would have done it. But it was helpful.
HAUS: We’ve talked about the underlying thesis back when you started being ‘give me the boy until he is seven and I shall give you the man.’ Do you believe that more, or less, now?
APTED: Less now. Not as much as one would like. But I do feel there is a sense of fairness in society. Much more fairness. You know, when you look at Seven Up and 14 Up it was sort of shocking how little ambition they had, the working class people. Even so there weren’t enough but three of the four girls were working class and quite a few of the boys, so more than 50% — we could see what was happening.
HAUS: If you look at the upper class kids, they seemed to know exactly what they were going to do. And they wound up doing something quite similar to that. And the others less so, they were sort of ricocheting around.
APTED: I think that’s true, and that was because they were bright people and wanted to see the future, and wanted to influence their future. So they were more likely to see what was coming, as we could see what was coming, because it was sort of obvious once we had the conservative government out and had a run of the labor party, then we could see all these things really beginning to happen—slowly, but beginning to happen—and the really bright ones who were in the film saw that too. And of course, they had the opportunities and the money to exercise that. And to go to posh private schools.
HAUS: One of the participants, Nick, has expressed that he’s better known for being in this film than for his work, his science.
APTED: Well, we all are!
HAUS: These days we all know we have to be careful what we say online because it might come back to haunt us years later. But these were seven year old kids in the sixties talking to a camera. When you’re seven, no emission out of your mouth is really any more or less important than any other, and yet these kids have been stuck with these otherwise random things they said for fifty years now. Like, oh, ‘I don’t like girls,’ or whatever.
APTED: [Laughs] On the things that really mattered, they did have the right thing. When you’re seven to 14, it was embarrassing to be with girls. It was a version of them being up to date.
HAUS: Have you tried, over all these installments of this program, to focus on different themes with each one?
APTED: No, I’ve let them do it. That was a big thing I realized after about 28 Up. I was asking all the questions, which they were answering as well as they could. But it occurred to me. I shouldn’t be asking the fucking questions. They should be. And that was a bit of a change in the weather. Because I so much wanted to be logical, that I would have all these questions so I would cover everything. But the thing was just to take a bit of time to find out what their interests really are. I tried to find out what they wanted to talk about, what they were up to.
HAUS: So you have the secret for how to do a good interview, but you held it until the end of mine to tell me?
APTED: [Laughs] It was a slow process, I tell you. Figuring out how to do it, how to ask questions. The key is to withdraw more. Not to walk in with a list of questions, and probably frighten them to death. There were one or two things I knew I had to ask. I wrote them on a bit of paper and put them in my pocket. But really it’s to go with them, go with their flow. They got much more articulate, because then they were talking about what they wanted to talk about. It sounds simple but it was a big change.
And lastly, on why Michael Apted is still going strong at nearly 80 years old:
APTED: I always wanted to work, I was happy doing other things but I felt that the work was my life.
I mean, I’m quite old now, 78, I don’t know how many more I’ve got in me. But you know, I would want to keep it going until I drop dead.
HAUS: And what will happen when you’re no longer willing to do it? Will it be handed off?
APTED: When I do drop dead? Well, [producer] Cort Kristensen might take it over, because he was my assistant. That’s what I did. I mean, if he behaves himself. [Laughs] He understands what it’s about.
63 Up opens in limited release November 27, 2019 (official trailer); it opens in the Bay Area on December 13 (at Opera Plaza in San Francisco, and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael), and will be available on the subscription-based streaming platform BritBox.
Never miss a review — sign up for email updates to the right, follow us on Twitter, or like The Parsing Haus on Facebook!