`It`s a very important project for me, perhaps the most important of my whole career.”
British director Michael Apted is talking about his films. But he`s not referring to such Hollywood hits as the Academy Award-winning ”Coal Miner`s Daughter,” ”Gorky Park” or ”Gorillas in the Mist.” He`s talking about a series of documentaries that began in 1964 with ”7 Up” and which introduced a diverse group of some 15 7-year-old children sharing their hopes and ambitions.
Apted, who was a researcher on ”7 Up,” has since revisited these same subjects as a director at seven-year intervals in a fascinating series
(”7+7,” ”21” and ”28 Up”).
Now Apted has released the latest installment, ”35 Up,” which once again chronicles the lives of such people as Tony, who wanted to be a jockey and who`s now a cab driver; Jackie, who wanted to be happily married and who`s now divorced; and Neil, who wanted to be an astronaut and who`s now homeless. The director, who was instrumental in selecting the children for the original documentary, reports that the main inspiration for ”7 Up” lay in
”the old Jesuit maxim, `Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.` ”
But after 28 years, Apted dismisses the idea as ”too generalized,”
although he agrees that ”There`s some truth in terms of social mobility. Only one of them, Bruce, who became a missionary in Bangladesh after graduating from Oxford with a degree in math, has been socially mobile. In `28 Up` he talked about the divisiveness of the class system and how he wanted to teach poor Bangladesh children, despite his family`s other expectations for him. So he`s the only one who consciously made the move. The rest of them have stayed pretty heavily in their own class and within their own expectations. So in that sense, the Jesuit saying is right.”
Of course Apted isn`t merely concerned with his subjects` social mobility or lack thereof. ”In a more important sense, are these people emotionally what they were at 7?” he asks. ”Could you see what was going to happen to them emotionally? The honest answer is, I don`t know. I think everyone`s opinion is equally valid.”
Maintaining some sort of objectivity was ”pretty tough,” admits the director. ”It`s very difficult to not slant it, but they never complain about the way I present them. They may have little complaints about the bits I use or reject, but none of them have ever dropped out because of the way they were portrayed.”
Apted is well aware of the power of the medium. ”I know I could present them in many different ways,” he allows. ”I could make Tony, the failed jockey, look like a real little crook if I so chose. But how you see them on film is how I perceive them, and they seem happy about that. Now whether I make them nicer than they are or whatever, I don`t know. Obviously everything I do is somewhat loaded by who I am. But I am aware of that. I don`t want to inflict my own middle-class ambitious neurosis on them: the idea that anyone who isn`t successful is therefore unhappy.”
Apted calls such an attitude ”preposterous. If I`ve learned anything from the films it`s that. Of course it`s tough to be happy if you`re broke and homeless, but I`ve learned partly through these films that happiness is much more to do with satisfaction and peace of mind than it is to do with how much money you have or how successful your career is.”
The films` sequence of talking heads builds a compelling series of portraits and the director suggests that ”if the interviews are powerful it`s because they`re so intimate. I know these people, and the longer we`ve gone on, the closer we`ve become, because the age gap diminishes each time” (Apted is 14 years older).
The director notes that such intimacy is pardoxically both artificial and real. ”Some of us are close and it really is strange,” he states. ”It`s like interviewing your cousin, so there`s this great intimacy which I think sometimes appears shocking. Some of the questions shock me when I watch the film, but they`re not shocking when I do it. I don`t try to be shocking. So the whole questioning comes from an intimacy, which I think is both good and dangerous, dangerous because I obviously have perceptions of those I like. Others may give me a hard time. This intimacy is both the making of the program and a defect.”
Apted stresses that he conducts all interviews ”totally cold, although sometimes I have to spend a lot of time with them to get them to do it, which is the most difficult part of the whole enterprise. Also I do it to reassure them of who I am. I deliberately avoid discussing anything about the interview. I`ll ask them before if there`s anything they don`t want to talk about. For instance, Tony won`t talk about money. John didn`t want to talk about his love life. The whole process has to be collaborative, otherwise they`d never do it, so there are certain ground rules in the interview. After that, the interview is fairly formless and fairly long, between 2 and 4 hours of filming.”
Apted, who relocated to Los Angeles in the `70s, keeps in contact with some subjects between films. ”Some, such as Bruce, come and stay out here,” he reports. ”The only difficult one to track down is Neil, and he`s very anxious to cooperate, so we get him through the Welfare.”
A few, however, have refused to appear in the latest installment, to Apted`s great disappointment. ”There are all different reasons,” he explains. ”Peter, who I cut out completely from `35 Up` because of time constraints, got hammered by the press after `28.` He was the disillusioned teacher, and very interesting. He was saying that Britain was in terrible shape, that the Thatcher government was responsible, that there was no money in teaching. Well, the press went beserk saying, `How dare this person be teaching our kids.` So he`d had enough.”
Other refusals inspire less sympathy in Apted. ”Symon was great as a kid, and very open, but when he got married I had terrible trouble with his wife,” he reports. ”At 28 she tried to sabotage him doing it, and told me never to ask him again. Well I did, but he wouldn`t. As for Charles, he`s just a jerk. He works at the BBC and does this for a living, and won`t do it himself.”
What does Apted look for in choosing and ordering his raw material? ”I suppose it`s my perception of them and what I learn about them during the interview,” he states. ”It`s interesting how the running times of the films varied drastically every 7 years. Sometimes not much happens to a person in 7 years, so they have less to say. Other times, there are dramatic changes.”
As an example, Apted cites Suzy, ”who at 28 was traumatically different from the chain-smoking girl of 21. She was reborn, and so there was a big chunk of film in `28 Up,` whereas this time not much had happened. Then the three girls from London`s East End-Jackie, Lynn and Sue-were as boring as hell I felt at 28, so they had very little screen time. But this time, two of them had got divorced and one had become a single parent, so there was a lot more to talk about. And that`s good, because it means different people carry the weight in each film.”
On ”35 Up,” Apted was most surprised by the fact that ”so many had lost their parents-there`s a real feeling of mortality. The other thing that`s more subtle but more moving to me was that so many now have kids the same age they were when I started. And filming them teaching their kids things I`d seen them learning, I got the feeling of a circle, of knowledge and wisdom being passed on. It was very moving to me to see Lynn teach her kids to bake a cake having filmed her at cookery class at 14.”
Does Apted feel his subjects are honest on camera, or that the very act of being observed alters their behavior? ”I don`t think it`s affected their lives in any major way, in that they haven`t taken a job or married because of it. But individually it must affect them.”
Likewise, the documentaries have affected the director`s life and career. ”I`ve always felt it`s a two-way street doing documentaries and movies,”
he agrees. ”Clearly documentaries inform the way I do movies. In the same way, movies definitely help me put these films together, because you`re building character.”
The international success of the series has spawned similar projects in other countries, including an American version produced by Apted and a Russian one. ”I can see it becoming this worldwide franchise, as there`s now talk of a German one and a Japanese one,” he adds.
