THE OBSERVER (REMEMBERING MICHAEL APTED)

  

Michael Apted was not a household name but the chances are if you grew up in the 1980s and 90s you saw some of his work.

One of the most versatile directors Britain has ever produced, he made feature films, directed episodes of TV dramas and made documentaries.

His career saw him direct a Bond movie with Pierce Brosnan as well as episodes of 'Coronation Street,' 'Rome' and 'Ray Donovan'.

He also worked with the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Sissy Spacek, Lee Marvin, Jodie Foster, Liam Neeson and Tilda Swinton.  

As a documentary filmmaker, he was best known as the driving force behind the groundbreaking TV series '7 Up' and chronicled Sting's emergence as a solo rock star after the break-up of The Police.

Born in Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire in 1941, Apted came from solid middle class stock.

His father was employed by an insurance company and he secured a scholarship to the City of London School whose alumni include Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, Nobel Prize winning scientists Frederick Gowland Hopkins and Peter Higgs, the novelists Kingsley Amis and Julian Barnes and the actor Daniel Radcliffe.

In an interview with the Directors Guild of America in 2018, Apted recalled his attendance at the school "gave me a sense of a big city and that led to an interest in amateur drama."

"When I was 14, I went to the Academy Theatre and saw an Ingmar Bergman film 'Wild Strawberries'. That changed my life because I had been going to the movies really as a social event but I never really knew the existence of anything profound or lasting about movies and this was my road to Damascus.

"From then on, this is what I wanted to do."

Apted's mother also instilled in him a love of the theatre but he initially studied law and history at Downing College in Cambridge where he got involved in drama, rubbing shoulders with contemporaries like Stephen Frears, Trevor Nunn, Mike Newell and John Cleese.

He graduated at a time when commercial television was starting to challenge the dominance of the BBC and landed a traineeship at Granada Television in Manchester.

It was there where he came under the wing of the Australian documentary filmmaker Tim Hewat who was in charge of the 'World on Action' current affairs team.

"The company was too small to train us, so it was on the job training," he recalled.

"We jumped in straight away, making horrific mistakes and things like that but it didn't seem to matter.

"One of the shows I did was '7 Up'. 

"Hewat said: 'The English social system stinks to Heaven, how are we going to dramatise it? How are we going to show that? You know, we could talk to journalists and intellectuals but why not get seven year old kids in and ask them about their lives and their hopes?'"

Testing the Catholic Church's Jesuit Order's principle 'Give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man,' the series would become a factual television classic.

As a researcher, Apted was responsible for identifying the 20 children from a range of social backgrounds to take part in the series directed by the Canadian filmmaker, Paul Almond.

The one-off film aired on ITV in 1964 and the children were taken on a group outing to London Zoo.

Interviewed about their lives, they ranged from Andrew Brackfield, who attended a prep school in Kensington and claimed to read the Financial Times to Jackie Bassett from a working class primary school in London's East End to Nick Hitchon who was raised on a small farm in Arncliffe in the Yorkshire Dales and to Neil Hughes, an optimistic kid from the suburbs of Liverpool.

The show created quite a stir and for Apted, it would become a passion project that he would develop for the rest of his life as he chronicled the lives of 14 of the children every seven years with the series '7 Plus 7' in 1970, '21 Up' in 1977, '28 Up' in 1984, '35 Up' in 1991, '42 Up' in 1998, '49 Up' in 2005, '56 Up' in 2012 and '63 Up' in 2019.

All the series aired on ITV with the exception of '42 Up' which BBC1 broadcast.

The celebrated US film critic Roger Ebert in 1991 chose '28 Up' as one of the 10 greatest films of all time.

'35 Up' and '42 Up' would land him the BAFTA Flaherty award for Best Documentary and the series would receive a Peabody Award in 2012.

Apted took charge of the project as director from '7 Plus 7' onwards and later claimed the original director Paul Almond had produced a skilfully made film but had little feel for the profound impact of the class system in England.

"He turned it into a nice film but I turned it into a political document - that if you were born into a certain environment, you had no chance at all of achieving any ambition," he observed.

"It was going to be controversial, crude, no holds barred and was going to tell it as it was.

"It had a huge effect on the country, not just on television because it showed graphically how awful things were."

Over the years, avid viewers of the series saw Andrew go to Cambridge, become a solicitor and settle down with a wife and family.

Jackie went to comprehensive school, married at the age of 19, divorced, marry again and move to Scotland only to divorce again, raise three children as a single mum and end up on disability benefits.

Nick was educated in a boarding school, went to Oxford where his contemporaries included future Prime Minister Theresa May, move to the United States to work as a nuclear physicist, marry, divorce, remarry, become an academic and battle throat cancer.

Neil, who was vivacious in the first film, dropped out of Aberdeen University, moved into a squat in London while working on building sites, moved to Scotland but was still homeless, secured a council house in the Shetland Islands, moved to London, got involved in politics as a Liberal Democrat councillor, completed an arts degree with the Open University, moved to Cumbria, secured a council seat, contested a Westminster election, married, separated and became a lay preacher with a home in France.

In an interview with Slate to promote '63 Up,' Apted would muse that with the original film: "We wanted to look at England in 1963, '64.

"It was loosely done. We were looking at the big picture. 

"I had no idea it would go on as long as it did. We didn't plan the second until five years after the first. When we decided to do it again and again, it was [about] what aspect of change in their lives or the country's life was important."

He continued: "I can't speak highly enough about the impact of the series.

"No-one had done it and it was an original idea.

"It couldn't be done like this again. We had inspiration and luck to keep going. People copied it.

"We tracked major events and progress in society. I'm glad we did it when we did it. We couldn't have chosen a better period."

During a seven year spell at Granada, Apted also branched into directing drama including episodes of the popular Manchester-set ITV soap 'Coronation Street,' lobbying producers to let him direct while his friend Mike Newell went on holiday.

Not only would 'Coronation Street' give him a grounding in how to handle actors but he would also encounter the writer Jack Rosenthal with whom he would later work on a number of projects.

He would pick up further experience at Granada directing drama on 'City 68' which featured a young Martin Shaw, the thriller 'Big Breadwinner Hog' with Peter Egan and Timothy West, the village police drama 'Parkin's Patch,' the children's TV series 'Follyfoot' with Desmond Llewellyn and Arthur English and pilot episodes for Rosenthal's sitcoms 'The Dustbinmen' with Bryan Pringle and 'The Lovers' with Richard Beckinsale and Paula Wilcox.

He made his feature film directorial debut in 1972 with 'The Triple Echo' which starred Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed and saw him working with the producer David Puttnam for the first time.

The same year, his TV film of Jack Rosenthal's 'Another Sunday and Sweet FA' about a Sunday League amateur football referee with David Swift won the TV Critics' Circle's Play of the Year Award.

After Granada, there was a 1973 sitcom pilot for BBC1 he directed from the Irish writer Hugh Leonard, 'High Kampf' with Brenda Fricker.

There would be a BAFTA for his work on Colin Welland's BBC1 Play for Today 'Kisses at 50' with Bill Maynard and Rosemarie Dunham.

His second feature film 'Stardust' in 1974 saw him work with David Essex, Adam Faith and a pre-JR Ewing Larry Hangman in a BAFTA nominated follow-up to 'That'll Be The Day'.

It would score a minor success at the box office.

A year later, Apted embarked on another film 'Trick or Treat' with Bianca Jagger and Nigel Davenport, a Ray Connolly and Kathleen Tynan scripted tale about a lesbian couple who want a baby getting involved with a married couple.

The production saw a stand-off between Jagger and the producers over scenes requiring her to be nude and she denounced their script as pornography.

After assembling over 40 minutes of unusable footage in a piece that Connolly had envisaged as an erotic drama in the mould of Claude Chabrol, the plug was pulled on the movie resulting in a flurry of lawsuits.

In 1976, Apted directed at Granada Harold Pinter's 'The Collection' for 'Laurence Olivier Presents' on ITV with Olivier, Helen Mirren, Malcolm McDowell and Alan Bates.

Apted worked with Francesca Annis on 'Play for Today's' film of Stephen Poliakoff's 'Stronger Than The Sun' in 1977 which attracted rave reviews.

After the mess of 'Trick or Treat',' his next foray into feature filmmaking was the British gangster drama 'The Squeeze' with Stacy Keach, David Hemmings and Edward Fox, which also featured The Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones as an extra.

A hit with audiences and critics in Britain, it failed to replicate its success in the US - although Keach was very complimentary about Apted's work on the film.

Apted teamed up again with producer David Puttnam and writer Kathleen Tynan in 1979 for 'Agatha' - a movie about the crime writer Agatha Christie.

With Vanessa Redgrave in the lead, Dustin Hoffman playing an American journalist and Timothy Dalton as her husband, the film shot by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro was mostly well received by the critics.

Tensions between Hoffman and Puttnam onset would linger right up to 1987 during the latter's turbulent time as the studio head at Columbia Pictures.

A year later, Apted made arguably his best received movie 'Coalminer's Daughter' - a biopic of the country singer Loretta Lynn which landed Sissy Spacek the Academy Award for Best Actress and also featured Tommy Lee Jones.

Nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture but not for his direction, it was the seventh highest grossing film of the year and praised for its intelligence by critics like Roger Ebert.

Reflecting on its success, Apted recalled how Spacek spent six weeks perfecting Lynn's singing voice and learning her mannerisms.

"Well, I've never really been an actor," he told the Directors Guild of America.

"My way of directing actors is to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. For me, it's always a case of not being afraid to talk about the characters and scenes a lot and get their input as much as I can - not to go in there and say to them: 'This is what I want you to do'.

"I mean, specific directions may come later in matters of staging or whatever. But I begin trying to help them feel part of the character.

"Sissy had to enter the living world of Loretta. The documentarian in me is still very large. I think I am much more of a documentarian than I am a theatrical person.

"So whenever I do anything I go to what is the truth of the matter, even if it's kind of a ridiculous or invented truth. But to get into that world and to find a way to rehearse, which introduces them to their world.

"Like if they're playing a cop, go out with a cop - to get them to look at the world which we're going to inhabit in as intimate a way as possible."

His follow up in 1981 was the romcom 'Continental Divide' with John Belushi and Blair Brown which performed respectably at the box office and was the first feature to be credited as having been produced by Steven Spielberg's company Amblin Entertainment.

Now well established in Hollywood, Apted switched his focus back on Britain.

In 1982 on the second night of Channel 4, his film of Jack Rosenthal's 'P'Tang Yang Kipperbang' with Alison Steadman aired and received enthusiastic reviews.

Buoyed by its success, he took on the big budget Moscow set thriller 'Gorky Park' with William Hurt, Lee Marvin, Joanna Pacula, Ian Bannen, Brian Dennehy and Michael Elphrick.

A critical and commercial success, it cemented Hollywood's faith in his ability to handle a studio film.

However his next project, the family drama 'Firstborn' with Corey Haim, Teri Garr, Peter Weller, Sarah Jessica Parker and Robert Downey Jr stumbled with critics and audiences.

In 1985, Sting asked Apted to chronicle rehearsals for his first outing as a solo artist since the break-up of The Police with a band of up and coming jazz musicians in Paris.

'Bring on the Night' followed rehearsals for the Paris gig and the subsequent tour for Sting's solo album 'The Dream of the Blue Turtles' and it won a Grammy for Best Music Video, Long Form in 1987.

In 1987, he directed Richard Pryor and Joe Mantegna in the comedy 'Critical Condition' about a conman posing a surgeon but it barely survived a critical mauling, just about scraping a small profit. 

Apted scored another critical and commercial success in 1988 with 'Gorillas In The Mist', an Academy Awards nominated drama with Sigourney Weaver and Bryan Brown about the naturalist Dian Fossey that earned its lead actress a place on the Oscar shortlist.

In 1989, Apted made 'The Long Way Home', an acclaimed documentary film about Boris Grebenshchikov, the Russian underground musician who became the first Soviet artist to record in the West.

He directed Gene Hackman, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Laurence Fishburne and Colin Friels in the critically well received 1991 legal drama 'Class Action' which was a modest commercial success.

In 1992, Apted directed episodes of the ITV soap 'Crossroads' and also made the acclaimed documentary 'Incident at Ogala' about the deaths of two FBI agents in 1975 on a Native American reservation.

Narrated by Robert Redford, it would inspire Apted's atmospheric 1992 neo-Western 'Thunderheart' with Val Kilmer, Sam Shepard, Graham Greene and Fred Ward.

Produced by Robert de Niro, Jane Rosenthal and John Fusco, 'Thunderheart' attracted decent reviews and performed creditably in cinemas without setting critics or audiences alight.

The thriller 'Blink' saw him direct Madeleine Stowe as a blind musician stalked by a killer and Aidan Quinn as a detective trying to protect her in a so-so thriller that received mixed reviews and made a thin profit.

Sting's wife Trudie Styler produced Apted's well received 1994 documentary 'Moving the Mountain' which focused on the events surrounding the Tiananmen Square protests five years earlier and featured interviews with the student leaders behind the protests that were brutally suppressed by the Chinese authorities.

That same year, he released 'Nell' - a plodding tale with Jodie Foster, Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson about a petrified woman confined for years in the rafters of a log cabin in North Carolina who has to learn how adjust to normal life.

The film earned Foster a Best Actress Oscar nomination and was a hit with audiences.

Apted directed an episode of Mary Tyler Moore's shortlived CBS newspaper industry drama in 1995.

He teamed up with Laurence Fishburne in 1997 for HBO's 'Always Outnumbered' with Natalie Cole and Bill Nunn about an ex-con's attempts to build a new life for himself.

That year Apted explored creativity in the documentary 'Inspirations' which featured interviews with David Bowie, the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, the architect Tadao Ando, the glass sculptor Dale Chihuly, the potter and poet Nora Noranjo-Morse, the dancer Louise Le Cavalier and the choreographer Édouard Lock.

In 1998, Apted teamed up with Hackman again for the medical thriller 'Extreme Measures' which starred Hugh Grant, Sarah Jessica Parker and David Morse.

However the movie underperformed with audiences and critics, earning mixed to negative reviews.

In 1999, he got the chance to direct a 007 film with Pierce Brosnan as James Bond facing off Robert Carlyle's KGB thug in 'The World is Not Enough'.

Also starring Sophie Marceau and Denise Richards, with Judi Dench, Robbie Coltrane, Samantha Bond and John Cleese, it raced to the top of the box office on both sides of the Atlantic but received sniffy reviews from some critics who thought its plot was convoluted.

There was another documentary 'Me and Isaac Newton' from him that year in which he examined advances in science.

The '7 Up' series inspired him to launch in the US another documentary experiment 'Married in America' in 2001 initially on the A&E network and for a second season on the Hallmark Channel.

It featured an interracial couple in New York, a former Marine and his wife in Alabama, a widower and his new partner in Mexico and a lesbian couple in New Jersey.

The intention was to follow their marriages for two years every ten years but it was not renewed.

In 2001, Apted made 'Enigma' - a Tom Stoppard scripted tale about the Second World War codebreakers in Bletchley Park starring Kate Winslet, Dougray Scott, Jeremy Northam, Saffron Burrows and Tom Hollander.

Produced by Mick Jagger, who had a cameo as an RAF officer and Lorne Michaels, it received good reviews and performed decently at the box office.

In 2002, Apted had a more troubled production on his hands with 'Enough' - a thriller with Jennifer Lopez, Billy Campbell, Noah Wyle and Juliette Lewis.

Panned by critics, it made a profit but during filming Lopez had a nervous breakdown as she immersed herself in the role of an abused wife.

In 2005, HBO and BBC2's series 'Rome' saw Apted direct the first three episodes and work with a cast that included Ciaran Hinds, Polly Walker, Kenneth Cranham, Ray Stevenson and Kevin McKidd.

In 2006, Apted was commissioned by FIFA to make the official film of the World Cup in Germany which Italy won, with Pierce Brosnan narrating.

That year also saw him direct 'Amazing Grace' with Ioan Gruffudd, Romola Garai, Ciaran Hinds, Rufus Sewell, Michael Gambon, Youssou N'Dour Benedict Cumberbatch and Albert Finney about the campaign to end the slave trade in Britain.

While it barely made a profit, Apted's film was critically lauded in Britain with Steven Knight's screenplay earning a nomination at the Evening Standard Film Awards and the movie receiving a Christopher Award.

Apted returned to another big budget project with 'The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader' -  the third and final installment of the trilogy of movies based on CS Lewis' fantasy novels.

A huge hit with audiences despite a mixed critical reception, the film saw him work with Will Poulter, Simon Pegg, Tilda Swinton and Liam Neeson as Aslan.

He co-directed with Curtis Hanson the 2012 surfing drama 'Chasing Mavericks' with Gerard Butler, taking over directorial duties for the last 15 days of production while Hanson had cardiac surgery.

The film attracted mixed reviews and failed to cause a ripple among audiences.

Between 2013 and 2016, he was called upon to direct episodes of Showtime's 'Masters of Sex' across its four season run with Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan as the research team Masters and Johnson.

In 2013, Apted also directed the season finale of 'Ray Donovan' on Showtime with Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight, returning to direct an episode in the fourth season.

He directed an episode in the third and final season of Netflix's thriller 'Bloodline' with Kyle Chandler, Linda Cardellini and Sissy Spacek.

His last feature film was the 2017 British action thriller 'Unlocked' with Noomi Rapace, Orlando Bloom, John Malkovich, Toni Collette and Michael Douglas.

A by the books espionage thriller, it was hammered by critics and faded quickly on its release.

Apted did not court publicity for much of his career.

Married three times, he kept his family life away from the spotlight but suffered the loss of a son Paul in 2014, a sound editor who worked on movies like James Mangold's 'The Wolverine', after a battle with colon cancer.

Heavily involved in the Directors Guild of America and living in LA, he was its president between 2003 and 2009 and secretary-treasurer from 2011 until his death.

It is clear from reaction to his death how highly he was regarded in the industry and by those whose lives he chronicled in the '7 Up' series.

It would, therefore, be a shame, having invested so much in the '7 Up' documentary series, if the project were to die with Apted's passing.

Few would argue against the series continuing after his passing to chronicle entire lives.

It is probably what he would have wanted.

Whoever takes on the project will know they will be stepping into very accomplished shoes.

However it would be a fitting tribute to Apted to carry on a lifetime's work right to the last frame.

(Michael Apted passed away at the age of 79 on January 7, 2021)