At The Academy: 63 UP
For 55 years, director Michael Apted has spearheaded one of the longest-running projects in cinematic history: the Up series, which began with the short film 7 Up chronicling the lives of 14 British children in 1964. Since then he has returned to them in seven-year intervals, and he stopped by the Academy to talk about his most recent documentary in the series, 63 Up.
These regular revisits don’t mean he keeps in constant contact with his subjects. In fact, as Apted explains, “I didn’t want to be shadowing their lives. I didn’t want them to be thinking that they have to put on a performance for me. And so even if lots of interesting things happened in the seven years, if it didn’t kind of fit into what was clearly going on, then I wouldn’t touch it, otherwise these films would be here for three weeks watching it.” However, he does check up on them about once a year to make sure they’re all doing fine and to find out about any problems in their lives.
As he continues, because “we only film them every seventh year, so you know, you want to keep it swift, and not to fill them up with stuff you couldn’t possible follow. Everything has to be kind of fixed on the seventh year. Obviously there’s things that I cheated on — when Bruce got married, we went to shoot that, or something like that, but I try to keep it as honorable as I can to the seventh year, otherwise I’d have so much material I’d kill myself!” Of course that means a great deal of filmed material also ends up on the cutting room floor, which makes for good bonus material on the eventual home video releases.
In the course of making these films, Apted has also watched England evolve considerably over the decades. “Their lives are different than mine was when I was growing up,” he says. “England has changed, dramatically; we fortunately got a nice period with it, there was huge change, you can hardly believe what England was like when we started — whenever that was, 1964, it was a different world. Not necessarily a worse world, not necessarily a better world now. It has changed a lot.” That includes the dramatically increased opportunities for women over the years, which had an impact on how the films were approached: “You know women came into society roaring, and we didn’t miss it, but it happened so quickly, when you think of the 14 people that we chose, only four were women. I mean, you know, you wouldn’t like that, would you? If you said it was run by men, well, it was. But once I’d got the thing in motion, there’s no way out of it. I mean I cheated, I used the wives of some of the boys who were very interesting!… When we did the first one, it was only 10years before Margaret Thatcher was doing her business, as we say.”
Of course, outside of this series Apted has made films driven by very strong female characters, such as the Oscar-winning Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980). “My mother was a very bright, clever woman who had to bring up three children,” he says of one of his chief inspirations. “My father didn’t make much money, so you know, but my mother was a very dominant figure in my life. And women were dominant in a lot of people’s lives, but it was never manifest in the world we lived in. You wouldn’t think that but when you look at what’s going on now, you wish there were a lot more women up there!…
I was my mother’s son; I could see the world changing from a woman’s point of view and that’s why I chose [the films I made] because that’s where everything was happening. You know, not men with guns, and all this kind of stuff. What was really happening in societies all over the Western world was women were moving in and still are, and annoying men by doing it!”
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