A Real Life Journeyman The Scanner talks to veteran filmmaker Michael Apted about the many different worlds he's created onscreen. The Q&A: The Chronicles of Michael Apted In an age when Hollywood is dominated by writer/director hybrids who create their own material, Michael Apted is a throwback to the days of the studio system, when directors were essentially factory employees who were assigned to make many different kinds of films during their decades-long careers. Revered Golden Age filmmakers like Howard Hawks and John Ford dabbled in a number of different genres from Westerns and social dramas to comedies and mysteries. Apted’s filmography is similarly wide-ranging. Born in Britain, the 66-year-old director got his start working on documentaries for the BBC, before emigrating to Hollywood in the late ’70s, where he made a big splash with Coal Miner’s Daughter (a musical biopic) and Gorky Park (a Col War-themed thriller). Since then, he’s directed Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist, Hugh Grant in Extreme Measures, J.Lo in Enough and, most recently, Ioan Gruffudd in Amazing Grace, a costume drama based on the life of one of England’s leading abolitionists William Wilberforce, who was instrumental in outlawing the slave trade in England. (He was also one of the driving creative forces behind HBO’s late, great series Rome.) But Apted’s most important work may be the Up films, an ongoing documentary series that has followed the lives of a group of British men and women from age 7 to age 49. The Scanner spoke with Apted about his reluctance to specialize in one genre, why Rome had to end so early and how he’s preparing for his next film, the big-budget fantasy epic, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The Scanner: Looking over your lengthy resume, I was surprised to see that Amazing Grace is your first 19th century costume drama. I assumed that every British director was required to make one of those when they were first starting out, but you’ve waited until relatively late in your career. Michael Apted: Well, I’ve been in America a long time. I’ve lived here 25 years now, so I suppose I’m out of the loop for the usual British costume stuff, which they do very well. Here in America, you don’t see many films about the founding fathers or that whole era. This is a big generalization, but I think because England is such an old culture and, dare I say it, in the second-tier of powers in the world, we tend to look back on our history with a little more hunger than America. America’s political power is more in the present and ours is in the past. The Scanner: Even though you haven’t made a costume drama, you have made period films before—Coal Miner’s Daughter and Enigma come to mind. How do you go about reconstructing those eras believably? Apted: It’s a tricky thing. What I really try to do is to get the spirit of the story right. What I don’t want to do, even though it’s hard to avoid sometimes, is making a film about peoples’ hats—in other words, letting the costumes run the show. What I’m looking for is the energy of the piece. Does it have an energy that could make it as contemporary as any modern drama? You just look for what the energy of what the story is rather than “Oh this is an interesting period to try and recreate.” The Scanner: So what energy did you find in the story of William Wilberforce? Apted: I had been looking to do a film about politics for a long time and could never find one, either contemporary or historical. I felt people had become indifferent or contemptuous towards politics, which I thought was a pretty unhealthy thing. Then this biopic of Wilberforce was sent to me and I thought there was a great political story there. If I could convince the studio that there’s a great political story here, I would be able to do something I had been looked for and I could give the material a bit more energy than making it about a person’s life from A to Z. In England, I got into a bit of trouble for this approach, with some people saying that the film was about white men helping to solve a black issue. And I said in return that the film is about the politics of it—this is how abolition was finally achieved, not by people in the streets, but by an act of Parliament. And that was Wilberforce’s great contribution. For 25 years, he stuck at it and finally achieved it. And until the abolitionist movement had the force of law behind it, it was kind of spinning its wheels. http://www.giantmag.com/2007/11/movies/real-life-journeyman/1/