Michael Apted is widely known as one of the most prolific and critically and commercially successful filmmakers of the past five decades. He began in news, documentaries, and television in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and started making features in the 1970s, including the classics Stardust (1974) and Agatha (1979), the latter starring Dustin Hoffman and Vanessa Redgrave. In the 1980s, his films Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), Continental Divide (1981), Gorky Park (1983), and Gorillas in the Mist (1988) were nominated for a combined twenty-five Golden Globes, Oscars, and BAFTAs, winning one Oscar and four Golden Globes.

Michael Apted

Kevin Winter/ Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

In the 1990s and 2000s, Apted’s features included Thunderheart (1992), Blink (1994), Nell (1994), Extreme Measures (1996), The World Is Not Enough (1999), Enigma (2001), Enough (2002), Amazing Grace (2006), The Chronicles of Narnia (2010), and Chasing Mavericks (2012). His most recent feature, Unlocked (2016), stars Noomi Rapace, Orlando Bloom, Michael Douglas, John Malkovich, and Toni Collette.

Apted is perhaps best known for his Up documentary series, produced by Granada Television. The series began in 1964 with Seven Up!, directed by Paul Almond. Apted was a researcher on the project and selected the fourteen 7-year-old children from different socioeconomic backgrounds who would become the heart of the film and the series to follow. The aim of Seven Up! was to shed light on the class systems at play in the UK in the 1960s, and every seven years since, Apted has gone back to visit the participants, resulting in another film in the series. There have been a total of eight films to date, 56 Up being the most recent in 2012.

The series has become iconic over the decades, in part because of its sobering reminder that our lot in life is the sum of a variety of factors, including—but certainly not limited to—the family we happen to be born into and the social and economic status of our childhoods.

28 Up (1984) and 35 Up (1991) won BAFTA’s Flaherty Documentary Award. In 1999, Apted received a Career Achievement Award from the International Documentary Association, and in 2013, he was awarded the Robert B. Aldrich Achievement Award from the Directors Guild of America.

I’d love to begin by talking about your education. How much do you think your education affected your career choices and your ability to achieve the kind of success you’ve had in your career?

Well, you have to remember, film schools didn’t exist in the United Kingdom when I was growing up, so that was never an option. I had a traditional education at university—but my passion to make movies started when I was 16, when I by chance saw Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. That was a complete revelation to me—that movies had the ability to carry emotion, to be more than entertainment. So that’s what introduced me to European films and really fired my ambition—and from then on, that’s all I wanted to do. But I could never see how I would get the opportunity to do it, because I had no connections with the industry, and I was really destined on a course to become a lawyer.

So you got your law degree, and then what was your transition into the industry?

I was at Cambridge in 1963, and the year that I was graduating, Granada Television came to recruit raw talent—to interview students who were interested in having a go at a career in television. A huge number of people applied, and I was one of the six chosen, so that was my great good fortune.

Just good fortune? Do you remember the interview process? Were you prepared?

I never thought I had a chance really. They met with a lot of people, and then they took about forty of us up to Manchester, and we stayed for two days—and they gave us quite a rigorous outing of interviews. And then at the end of those two days, they chose their six. But as I got deeper into the process, I could see that possibly I had a chance.

Most of the people wanted to go into drama, and although I liked drama, I was also very interested in social issues and current affairs. So the idea of going into the news/documentary side was in my mind, and I think I was one of only a few of the final people who pursued that, which made it a bit easier for me to get chosen, as it were. So when I went into Granada, I did news and current affairs and documentaries. But because it was a small company, it was possible to move around a bit, so I angled to get a chance to direct a soap opera.

When you say you angled to do that, what does that mean? Did you approach the showrunner of Coronation Street?

I approached the management. I’m not necessarily very assertive—I tend to be a bit timid—but in this case, when I had done two or three years of the documentary/news side, I just marched up to the management and said, “Look, my friend is going on holiday for three weeks. Can I do his Coronation Street?”

Was that nerve-wracking since you hadn’t done television drama yet at the time?

Yes, I suppose it was. And I always wondered when it would end. It all seemed too fortuitous, and it continued to be fortuitous for a long time. And I always thought my luck would turn, so I knew I had to make the most of it. Of course, my colossal piece of luck was becoming associated with Seven Up!—which, as you know, I still do it. I’ve been doing it for over fifty years now, and it’s been a major tissue of my whole career—which just happened by chance really.

Your involvement with the first film happened by chance, but the second film was your initiative, right? You pursued making that film?

Yes, I did. Although, I must say we were a bit dimwitted, because the first Seven Up! was fantastically successful because it had such social and political impact in the country. But we didn’t immediately say, well, let’s carry on and go back in seven years. It took a bit of time for that idea to gestate. I’d left Granada and had gone freelance, and then I went back to do the second film. And the whole of my working life, every seventh year I go back to England to do it. So it’s been a brilliant piece of luck for me that Granada has kept going with it.

You attribute this to luck, but there must be a business acumen to maintaining this relationship with Granada, I would imagine. Could you describe how that has worked over the years?

Well, sure—but I think we have a mutual interest in keeping it going. It’s one of their gems. And there isn’t any argument over budget, for example, because I do it as economically as I can, and Granada knows that. So if I need more money, they give me more money, because they know why I need more. I’ll do the next one— I think it’ll be 2019. So in 2018, I’ll go visit when I’m in London or Manchester and say, “When do you want to broadcast it?” And they’ll say, “In the spring of 2019 or the autumn of 2019,” and then I’ll reverse engineer it, because I know how long it will to take to prepare, how long it will take to shoot, and how long it will take to cut.

I haven’t worked at Granada much over the last decade, I suppose, but I did work quite a lot even when I came to America—I was still going back to do jobs for them. It’s a kind of relationship from heaven. A lot of people have these relationships with the studios, but I’ve never had that with an American studio. It’s never worked out that way. But the relationship I have with Granada, it’s been the reason why the film has kept going.

When you made the move initially from England to the US, can you tell me how Coal Miner’s Daughter came about? That was a pretty significant turning point in your career, and I’m curious how you chose the project.

Well, I hate to go on about it, but this was fortuitous as well. What happened was, I had come to America looking for work. I’d done about four movies in the UK in the 1970s, and most of them were paid for out of America. So my English agent recommended an American agent, and I met with him, and suddenly there was an opening at Universal. A director had been hired to do Coal Miner’s Daughter, but he didn’t want Sissy [Spacek] to play the role—although Sissy hadn’t committed to it yet. The studio wanted Sissy to do it, but the director said, she doesn’t look anything like Loretta Lynn, how can we possibly do this? So they fired him.

And the man who had written the script, Tom Rickman, had the same agent as my new American agent, so we met. And there was Sean Daniel, a young executive at Universal who’d seen a couple of my films from the UK. I’d done a rock ‘n’ roll film called Stardust, which had created a small stir among that generation here. So he pretty much talked the studio into letting me do the film—because they were thinking, how’s an Englishman going to do a film about country music? But anyway, that was the process by which little dots dropped in line, as it were—and I got the job.

It launched your career in the US.

Well, it turned out to be a very good job to get, not just because it was very good material, but it was good for an outsider to do it. With very few exceptions, every film about country music until then—or about that part of the world—had been patronizing and therefore unauthentic. It wasn’t because I’m not patronizing—with certain things I can be very patronizing. But I didn’t know anything about country music, so I had to learn it all. I went on the road with Loretta and got to know her.

So spending time in that part of the world and wanting to use the people who lived there in the film—I suppose that gave me a connection with the people. I had affection for them. I wasn’t patronizing them, although I’m anxious to say that it wasn’t because I’m a wonderful human being. It was just circumstances that made it such that I needed to get in touch with them so I could understand their world.

That seems to be a recurring theme in your work, actually—that you’re trying to connect with the subjects of your films, to understand them.

I think that’s probably true, yes. It’s the documentarian in me.

There’s a parallel moment between Neil in your last Up film and David Bowie in Inspirations that I’d love to talk to you about. You asked Neil about his mental health, and he said that he thought he was doing pretty well because he was working at Oxfam and he really enjoyed the company there. And then there’s this moment in Inspirations where Bowie talked about how the joy of making music was in the collaboration. He actually said the exact same thing as Neil—that he “enjoyed the company” of the people he worked with. Do you remember that?

I don’t!

I found it really emotional, because Bowie went on to say how left alone, his mind could be a dangerous neighborhood—that he was at his best when working with other musicians. I guess I was just thinking about that need to connect with and even create with others, in some cases.

Yes, it’s never occurred to me about Bowie. I haven’t seen the film I did with him in a bit, but reading about his career, he always engaged with people. He never just sat in his room to do his work. He got tremendous inspiration from meeting up with people and going on the road with other bands. That’s a very interesting thing about him.

And with you too, it seems—or what do you think? Is the collaborative nature of the work—connecting with others, is that gratifying to you?

Well yes, I suppose. I’ve always been more interested in relationships with people than I have been necessarily in reproducing other films, if you know what I mean. I’m very much driven by subject matter, and to pull that off you have to have an interest in the people, not just in the techniques of making movies. Even as a young man, as a schoolboy and as a university student, although my dream was to go into films, I was always curious about politics and sociology, and I think that’s significant in my choice of material to this day. I’m always looking for substance—emotional substance or political substance or social substance—in the stories I do.

Less so now I get older, but in my most fertile period, I wasn’t in Hollywood very much at all. Most of the films I made were either somewhere else in America or in other places. I think that’s also why I was anxious always to keep the documentaries going.

Would you say your documentary work feeds a different side of your creativity than the features?

Yes, I think so. I’ve deliberately kept my documentary life going so I wouldn’t get tangled with the narcissistic world of Hollywood—so I could get out into the world and be spared the rigors of keeping one’s contacts going in Hollywood and all the rest of it, which never appealed to me. I was never very good at that.

But I would say documentary is a big influence on every movie I make. If I have a problem, for example, I ask, what’s the reality of it all? Even when I did the Bond film and it was about taking gas out of the Caspian [Sea], we went down and had a look to see how it was all done. So I’ve always gone to the truth of the matter, whether it’s a psychological truth or a physical truth. I’ve always found that I get the best answers by researching and going into the reality of the world of the story. So I think there’s always a documentarian in every piece of work that I do.

Do you have a favorite part, a most rewarding part of the filmmaking process? Is it working with the actors or the writer, the editor?

It’s unpredictable. The hardest part of the Up films is getting them to show up, and that’s 90 percent of the aggravation and anxiety. I love shooting, but it’s the most difficult and most exhausting part of it, and I love the editing part that can go on endlessly if you have too many masters. I’m not particularly technical. I know what camera people I want to use, but I’m not knowledgeable in that way. I’m not a Christopher Nolan, for example, who knows a lot about technology. And each film is usually a complete shock, what turns out to go well and what turns out to go badly.

So there’s not a point during a shoot when it becomes clear that the film is working?

Oh no, I don’t think so. I don’t think you really know anything about it. And I think I actually mean that, because some of the films I’ve had horrific trouble doing, and they’ve turned out all right. So you never really know whether it works until an audience tells you. You can look at it and be jolly pleased with yourself or be hysterical with fear and loathing, but until people tell you that it’s okay, I don’t think you’re too optimistic. I mean, I’m not the kind of tedious bloke who says everything’s awful, nor am I the tedious bloke who says this is going to be the best film ever made. I think I’m always pretty pragmatic about it, because life is full of surprises.

Can I ask you about your work hours? You’re so prolific. I can’t imagine how much you must work. What does that look like for you?

I suppose I do—a bit less now. But I’ve paid the price for it. Without getting too personal, I’ve had two unsuccessful marriages. And I’ve always believed that you can’t have everything. If you’re going to work like I’ve worked and travel like I’ve traveled, it’s very, very hard to sustain a personal life, which has been a great sorrow for me. But it’s what I did, what I chose, and there’s been a lot of damage caused by that. It’s not all roses, if you know what I mean. You have to make decisions about life.

What’s an example of a tough decision you’ve had to make?

One of my first important decisions was to come and live in America once I saw that Coal Miner’s Daughter was going to give me some traction here—so I moved the family out. But it wasn’t, as it happened, the best thing to do, and it probably destroyed the marriage over a period of time. It sounds great to work all the time, to work hard, but it means that you probably pay a price for it.

Be careful what you wish for?

But I don’t really know what else to do apart from work. And now I’m getting very personal, but I’m not a person who has got a terrific number of hobbies, building things and such. I like to work. I like the process of it. I like the companionship of working, the socializing part of it, as well as the creative part. I’ve always liked to work, and I get kind of grumpy if I’m not working.

I’ve talked to several directors who have said the same thing—that they’re much better off when they’re working.

Yes, and everybody else is better off with me if I’m working, too!

Advice to the aspiring director. Any thoughts?

When I was at college, I was about 20, and a very famous English stage director who I hero-worshipped, Peter Brook, came down to talk to us all, and I cornered him afterward and said, “What do I do?” And he said, “Do it. If you want to be a director, do it. Even if you do it in the local church hall, just get on with it.” Because at the end of the day, the best education is doing the job. And that’s why I was lucky, because when I went to Granada, they weren’t big enough to train us, so we had to learn it on the job. And they were very patient with us.

So don’t intellectualize it. Get a job as an intern—get into the middle of it all somehow. You really learn when you have to do it yourself and when you start to make mistakes. So that’s my advice. If you want to make films, make your training as practical as you can.

I’m sure you’ve had a lot of interns and PAs over the years. Any qualities in some that stood out as particularly impressive or that would serve them well in the business?

Young people I’ve worked with, some have gone on to do well, and some disappear. You can’t always tell who’s going to be successful, because sometimes the pushy ones aren’t successful because that’s all they do—push, push, push. But when it comes time to deliver, they can’t necessarily.

But I am always interested in people who listen. I listen to people—that’s part of the ear of the documentarian. You have to listen. I don’t think people listen enough. People are so ambitious, especially in Hollywood now when it’s fashionable for studios to take in young directors. It’s staggering, the number of inexperienced directors who do these huge movies—but they’re going to get beaten up. The studios want to control everything, so they don’t want to hire experienced directors. They want to hire young directors who they can dominate.

So what advice would you have for the young director in that situation?

You’ve just got to be ready for it, and you’ve got to build relationships. It’s painful to watch. I had occasions when I was treated abominably by studios—and if it wasn’t for the fact that I had experience, that’s why I was able to survive it.

What I found in the last thirty years is that my English colleagues and I often did better than the Americans because we’d done the legwork. We’d done the news. We’d done lots of local television. Whereas our American colleagues had usually started doing movies straightaway. And the pressure on them is absolutely enormous. And it’s not fair. Unless you’re Orson Welles or Jean-Luc Godard or Steven Spielberg, where you have some instinct for it that belies everything, you’re going to have to learn and make mistakes. The statistics on getting the second film are horrifying. It’s not that difficult to get a first film if you’re reasonably lucky, but it’s very, very difficult to get the second one.

And that’s a piece of advice to give to people, because if you’re prepared for the first film, you’ll get the second one. But if you go into a film and you’re unprepared, it’s going to be brutal. And unless you’re a genius, it’s going to be an uphill struggle with very little room for failure. So don’t rush it, and don’t be seduced by Hollywood or by offers of work that you’re not ready to do. In a sense, those decisions were made for me. I was never offered a big film or a big job. I had to work my way through to it. Anyway, that’s my homily for you.

One final thing: television. I know you’ve been doing a lot of television recently …

Yes, I’ve gone back, in a way, to the world of television. I’ve been doing Masters of Sex and Ray Donovan—back from whence I came. I did a panel with [Francis Ford] Coppola once, and he said, “We all go back to our roots. I’m making student films now.” That’s how he started—his first movie was a student film, You’re a Big Boy Now. And there’s something truthful and appealing about that, saying that we go back from whence we came—back to the womb, as it were.