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| They Grow Up, but They Remain a Lifetime Pursuit | They Grow Up, but They Remain a Lifetime Pursuit |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| LOS ANGELES | LOS ANGELES |
| MICHAEL APTED has done the math: “I figured out that when we do ‘84,’ I’ll be 99.” He’s talking about what would be the 12th installment of his monumental documentary series tracking a group of English schoolchildren from different social spheres at seven-year intervals. What began in 1964 with “7 Up” and no longitudinal ambitions is now at “56 Up” and staring down the actuarial tables. | MICHAEL APTED has done the math: “I figured out that when we do ‘84,’ I’ll be 99.” He’s talking about what would be the 12th installment of his monumental documentary series tracking a group of English schoolchildren from different social spheres at seven-year intervals. What began in 1964 with “7 Up” and no longitudinal ambitions is now at “56 Up” and staring down the actuarial tables. |
| The signs are there, in the deep-lined face of Mr. Apted, the nearly 72-year-old director of the series. Gravity likes this face. It tugs at the cheeks and chin as he sits for an interview in his office here, framed posters of his movies arrayed on the walls around him. There’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” which won an Oscar for Sissy Spacek. And “Gorillas in the Mist,” “Nell” and “Amazing Grace,” as well as his contributions to the Bond and Narnia franchises. His only comedy, “Continental Divide,” starring John Belushi, hangs in the little bathroom opposite the toilet. As many and varied as these films are, it is the “Up” films that have set the unbroken rhythm, punctuating not just their 14 subjects’ lives but the private life and prolific career of this once timid son of a London insurance man turned expat Hollywood workhorse who seems to have little thought of slowing down, despite his contention that “ageism is a bit of an issue” in the industry. | The signs are there, in the deep-lined face of Mr. Apted, the nearly 72-year-old director of the series. Gravity likes this face. It tugs at the cheeks and chin as he sits for an interview in his office here, framed posters of his movies arrayed on the walls around him. There’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” which won an Oscar for Sissy Spacek. And “Gorillas in the Mist,” “Nell” and “Amazing Grace,” as well as his contributions to the Bond and Narnia franchises. His only comedy, “Continental Divide,” starring John Belushi, hangs in the little bathroom opposite the toilet. As many and varied as these films are, it is the “Up” films that have set the unbroken rhythm, punctuating not just their 14 subjects’ lives but the private life and prolific career of this once timid son of a London insurance man turned expat Hollywood workhorse who seems to have little thought of slowing down, despite his contention that “ageism is a bit of an issue” in the industry. |
| “As long as my marbles stay in order,” he says, “we’ll keep doing it.” | “As long as my marbles stay in order,” he says, “we’ll keep doing it.” |
| The “we,” this time around, includes 13 of the 14 former 7-year-olds who are defined by sound bites now a half-century old. Loyal viewers can recite them by heart as they’re redeployed with each successive film. “I want to be a jockey when I grow up” is the irrepressible East Ender Tony Walker’s line at 7. “My heart’s desire is to see my daddy, who lives 6,000 miles away,” is the wistful boarding schooler Bruce Balden’s. “I want to be an astronaut, or if I can’t be an astronaut, I think I’ll be a coach driver” belongs to the lively Liverpool lad Neil Hughes. “56 Up” finds Tony deflecting suggestions that he is racist because of his comments about immigrants in his old London neighborhood; Bruce camping out and telling flatulence jokes on a cricket field with his two young sons; and Neil, neither astronaut nor coach driver but the perennial searching soul of the series, quoting philosophy: “I think it was Albert Camus who said that life is what happens while you’re waiting for something else.” | The “we,” this time around, includes 13 of the 14 former 7-year-olds who are defined by sound bites now a half-century old. Loyal viewers can recite them by heart as they’re redeployed with each successive film. “I want to be a jockey when I grow up” is the irrepressible East Ender Tony Walker’s line at 7. “My heart’s desire is to see my daddy, who lives 6,000 miles away,” is the wistful boarding schooler Bruce Balden’s. “I want to be an astronaut, or if I can’t be an astronaut, I think I’ll be a coach driver” belongs to the lively Liverpool lad Neil Hughes. “56 Up” finds Tony deflecting suggestions that he is racist because of his comments about immigrants in his old London neighborhood; Bruce camping out and telling flatulence jokes on a cricket field with his two young sons; and Neil, neither astronaut nor coach driver but the perennial searching soul of the series, quoting philosophy: “I think it was Albert Camus who said that life is what happens while you’re waiting for something else.” |
| Participation in the “Up” films remains voluntary, although for some you sense that it’s voluntary the way pulling an abscessed tooth is voluntary. There are no contracts, but Mr. Apted has paid his subjects £10,000 to £20,000 (about $16,000 to $33,000), he said, because he views them as partners who should share in the small rewards of having their ordinary lives sliced open for a world of voyeurs; they are not, after all, Kardashians. | Participation in the “Up” films remains voluntary, although for some you sense that it’s voluntary the way pulling an abscessed tooth is voluntary. There are no contracts, but Mr. Apted has paid his subjects £10,000 to £20,000 (about $16,000 to $33,000), he said, because he views them as partners who should share in the small rewards of having their ordinary lives sliced open for a world of voyeurs; they are not, after all, Kardashians. |
| For “56 Up” Peter Davies, Neil’s childhood friend, resurfaces after skipping the last three films. He was scorched by “28 Up,” when he’d been a discontented schoolteacher who’d worn his scorn for Thatcherite Britain on his sleeve. Now he fronts a folk-rock band, the Good Intentions, named Americana act of the year at the British Country Music Awards. He didn’t hesitate to tell Mr. Apted that the reason he finally answered his persistent summons was to promote the band. | For “56 Up” Peter Davies, Neil’s childhood friend, resurfaces after skipping the last three films. He was scorched by “28 Up,” when he’d been a discontented schoolteacher who’d worn his scorn for Thatcherite Britain on his sleeve. Now he fronts a folk-rock band, the Good Intentions, named Americana act of the year at the British Country Music Awards. He didn’t hesitate to tell Mr. Apted that the reason he finally answered his persistent summons was to promote the band. |
| Only Charles Furneaux, one of the three upper-class boys, hasn’t returned to squirm in the petri dish that is Mr. Apted’s grand experiment. This rankles the director. Mr. Furneaux, who last appeared in “21 Up,” went on to make documentaries himself. “Someone who lives by the sword I feel should die by the sword,” Mr. Apted says, with a spark of irritation, as he contemplated his longest-term dropout. Mr. Furneaux does not comment publicly on why he left, but Mr. Apted says: “I think we had a very bad time together when he said he wasn’t going to do ‘28 Up.’ I probably behaved badly. I think I swore at him.” He concedes that “probably there’s quite a depth of ill feeling.” | Only Charles Furneaux, one of the three upper-class boys, hasn’t returned to squirm in the petri dish that is Mr. Apted’s grand experiment. This rankles the director. Mr. Furneaux, who last appeared in “21 Up,” went on to make documentaries himself. “Someone who lives by the sword I feel should die by the sword,” Mr. Apted says, with a spark of irritation, as he contemplated his longest-term dropout. Mr. Furneaux does not comment publicly on why he left, but Mr. Apted says: “I think we had a very bad time together when he said he wasn’t going to do ‘28 Up.’ I probably behaved badly. I think I swore at him.” He concedes that “probably there’s quite a depth of ill feeling.” |
| Still, it’s next to astonishing in a group this large that defection has claimed just one and death none. Mr. Apted himself rounded up the children when he was 22, just out of a university and a researcher in Granada Television’s training program. The process was quick and arbitrary, he says. He called on rich and poor schools, as well as a few in between, and asked them to volunteer their brightest and most voluble boys and girls to appear on an episode of the “World in Action” current affairs show. The show would examine the Jesuit maxim “Give me a child until he is 7, and I will show you the man.” There was not even a glimmer of intent then to check up on the man. Or rather the 10 men and 4 women. Mr. Apted says he regrets the shortsightedness of the gender imbalance; many of his feature films tell the stories of singular women forging a rough path, and he cites these later career choices as something of a corrective. | Still, it’s next to astonishing in a group this large that defection has claimed just one and death none. Mr. Apted himself rounded up the children when he was 22, just out of a university and a researcher in Granada Television’s training program. The process was quick and arbitrary, he says. He called on rich and poor schools, as well as a few in between, and asked them to volunteer their brightest and most voluble boys and girls to appear on an episode of the “World in Action” current affairs show. The show would examine the Jesuit maxim “Give me a child until he is 7, and I will show you the man.” There was not even a glimmer of intent then to check up on the man. Or rather the 10 men and 4 women. Mr. Apted says he regrets the shortsightedness of the gender imbalance; many of his feature films tell the stories of singular women forging a rough path, and he cites these later career choices as something of a corrective. |
| Mr. Apted would not have chosen his own 7-year-old self for the program and might have given the Jesuits a rethink too. His mother was evacuated from London while his father served in the war, so he was born in Aylesbury, a few miles northwest, but by the age of 7 he was living in the middle-class suburban London neighborhood of Ilford. His mother “used to have to walk me to school in case people stole my school hat, as I recall, because I was a bit weedy at 7.” He was, he says, “a very shy, timid child” — not one even he could foresee barking orders to a crew of 900 as he directed his 1999 James Bond film, “The World Is Not Enough.” | Mr. Apted would not have chosen his own 7-year-old self for the program and might have given the Jesuits a rethink too. His mother was evacuated from London while his father served in the war, so he was born in Aylesbury, a few miles northwest, but by the age of 7 he was living in the middle-class suburban London neighborhood of Ilford. His mother “used to have to walk me to school in case people stole my school hat, as I recall, because I was a bit weedy at 7.” He was, he says, “a very shy, timid child” — not one even he could foresee barking orders to a crew of 900 as he directed his 1999 James Bond film, “The World Is Not Enough.” |
| “I don’t know if one would have had any clues there,” he says. That goes for the 14-year-old Michael as well. He was attending a good school on scholarship, but “I hadn’t yet had my epiphany about movies.” | “I don’t know if one would have had any clues there,” he says. That goes for the 14-year-old Michael as well. He was attending a good school on scholarship, but “I hadn’t yet had my epiphany about movies.” |
| He puts that at the age of 16, when he saw Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries.” This might seem apt to the point of pat. That Bergman classic is about an old man looking back over his life — his childhood, his choices, his marriage, what it means to be human — all themes of self-reflection that power the “Up” project. If the names Apted and Bergman are separated by more than A and B in the film directors pantheon — words like “efficient” and “competent” tend to attach to him more often than “brilliant” or “visionary” — it is this project, begun seven years after “Wild Strawberries,” that puts Mr. Apted in his own sphere. “No one is ever going to do what I’ve done,” he says, and he’s not being immodest, just stating what is fairly certainly the truth. (It’s also fairly certain that no one ever suggested making a Broadway musical of the Bergman film, whereas Marvin Hamlisch once tried to interest Mr. Apted in a musical “Up.”) | |
| Despite his Bergman moment Mr. Apted says he was “clueless about how I would ever get into the business,” so at 21 he was studying law at Cambridge. But Granada opened doors. He filled in for a vacationing director on its long-running soap opera “Coronation Street,” and “that’s the beginning of how I had two careers.” | Despite his Bergman moment Mr. Apted says he was “clueless about how I would ever get into the business,” so at 21 he was studying law at Cambridge. But Granada opened doors. He filled in for a vacationing director on its long-running soap opera “Coronation Street,” and “that’s the beginning of how I had two careers.” |
| There is more on the horizon besides the stalking sunset of his signature work. He is looking to make yet another film with a female protagonist — this one about a woman living in the Middle East, where he was last month to pick up a lifetime achievement award from the Dubai International Film Festival. He would also like to return to his TV roots; like others he has noted that some of the best work around is on cable, and he wants a piece of that action. | There is more on the horizon besides the stalking sunset of his signature work. He is looking to make yet another film with a female protagonist — this one about a woman living in the Middle East, where he was last month to pick up a lifetime achievement award from the Dubai International Film Festival. He would also like to return to his TV roots; like others he has noted that some of the best work around is on cable, and he wants a piece of that action. |
| Mr. Apted points out that he is the only British director of his generation who “actually picked up my bed and walked,” as he answered the siren song of Hollywood, and in this he sees his nearest doppelgänger in the “Up” series as Nick Hitchon, the farm boy who made it to Oxford and then moved to America because that’s where the work was (in his case as a nuclear physicist). “We’ve had the same life,” Mr. Apted says. “We both had the casualty of a marriage en route to that; children to bring up in different societies.” Mr. Hitchon divorced a Briton and married an American, as did Mr. Apted, who is also divorced from his second wife, the screenwriter Dana Stevens. He has a 12-year-old son by his second marriage and two sons from his first, both now in the industry. | Mr. Apted points out that he is the only British director of his generation who “actually picked up my bed and walked,” as he answered the siren song of Hollywood, and in this he sees his nearest doppelgänger in the “Up” series as Nick Hitchon, the farm boy who made it to Oxford and then moved to America because that’s where the work was (in his case as a nuclear physicist). “We’ve had the same life,” Mr. Apted says. “We both had the casualty of a marriage en route to that; children to bring up in different societies.” Mr. Hitchon divorced a Briton and married an American, as did Mr. Apted, who is also divorced from his second wife, the screenwriter Dana Stevens. He has a 12-year-old son by his second marriage and two sons from his first, both now in the industry. |
| Mr. Apted’s first film here, “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (a musical adaptation of it is Broadway bound), was one of several he’s done that tell distinctly American stories. Once he did back-to-back films on the American Indian Movement: “Incident at Oglala” was a documentary and “Thunderheart” a drama. As much as any director around, he toggles between the forms, but when it comes to documentary, including the “Up” series, he says, “I don’t consider it to be any purer form of art than the feature film.” | Mr. Apted’s first film here, “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (a musical adaptation of it is Broadway bound), was one of several he’s done that tell distinctly American stories. Once he did back-to-back films on the American Indian Movement: “Incident at Oglala” was a documentary and “Thunderheart” a drama. As much as any director around, he toggles between the forms, but when it comes to documentary, including the “Up” series, he says, “I don’t consider it to be any purer form of art than the feature film.” |
| There is “something bogus about everything — about art.” | There is “something bogus about everything — about art.” |
| He adds that he doesn’t believe objectivity can exist, that “the only pure documentary I know is Andy Warhol filming the Empire State Building for 24 hours.” | He adds that he doesn’t believe objectivity can exist, that “the only pure documentary I know is Andy Warhol filming the Empire State Building for 24 hours.” |
| It was six and a half. But who’s counting. | It was six and a half. But who’s counting. |
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: | |
| Correction: January 4, 2013 | |
An earlier version of this article said that no one had ever suggested making a Broadway musical of a Bergman film. Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music” was an adaptation of the Bergman film “Smiles of a Summer Night.” | |