e exchange
‘natural sociologist’ snags asa honor
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<headline> Courtesy photo
The winner of the 2008 ASA Award for
Excellence in the Reporting of Social
Issues is the prolific filmmaker Michael
Apted. Within sociology he is best
known for his riveting Up films, which
vividly chronicle the life histories of 14
English children, originally selected in
1963 and re-interviewed at seven-year
intervals ever since. 49 Up, the most
recent film in the series, appeared in
2006.
Michael Apted is scheduled to
receive his award at the ASA Annual
Meeting in Boston and participate in a
special panel and audience discussion
on Saturday, Aug. 2 at 2:30 p.m.
On behalf of Contexts, sociologists
Michael Burawoy and Ruth Milkman
spoke with Apted about the Up films’
unique, long-term study of class and
social mobility in England.
Contexts: The Up films have been a
huge hit in the world of sociology, not
only because of their insights into class
and social mobility, but also because of
your interviewing method and your lon-
gitudinal analysis. We think of you as a
natural sociologist, but do you have any
training in this field?
Michael Apted: No, just a kind of nosy
interest in the human condition. I had
studied history and then I studied law at
Cambridge. For me this was a political
film. I was very angry about the English
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class system, the waste of people, the
prejudging. Every society has a class sys-
tem, but the English one is different, in
some ways more easy to spot. I have
always had this romantic liberal idea of
equal opportunity. If people show gifts
at an early age, that should be encour-
aged. And it’s so wasteful when it isn’t
or when people just don’t get an oppor-
tunity. So that emotion has always pro-
pelled the film.
C: It began as a political film, but then
over the years it became more of a
human drama. What happened?
M.A.: It was organic. As the children got
older, we got involved in the drama of
their growing up, and we got less inter-
ested in the political context. Also by
then the political context had less mean-
ing because England was changing. I
came to understand that the power of
what I had was in the interviews, in the
close-up, the people’s faces as they grew
up. It’s a snapshot of a generation.
“I came to understand that the power of what I
had was in the interviews, in the close-up, the
people’s faces as they grew up. It’s a snapshot of
a generation.”
C: C. Wright Mills once characterized
sociology as the intersection of biogra-
phy and history. How did history come
in?
M.A.: I have taken some punishment for
never putting it in a real historical con-
text. I tried it once or twice, and it was
catastrophic. It didn’t really fit. In the
end, their lives are the political state-
ments, not their opinions about exter-
nal political events.
C: The politics may have receded, but
the sociology remained central. The epi-
gram for the original film, repeated
throughout the series, is the old Jesuit
maxim, “Give me a child until he is
seven, and I will give you the man.” But
there is an ambiguity in that claim: Is it
about personality or about class back-
ground?
M.A.: It is both. But more importantly
about personality. Looking at the films,
and looking at my own children, too,
you get a feeling that the personality is
there from very early on. You never
know how people are going to develop,
how their muscles are going to develop,
but there’s a personality that doesn’t
change. If you’re an extrovert you stay
extroverted, if you’re introspective you
stay that way. It doesn’t tell you much
about how they are going to cope with
things in life, but that inner personality
seems to be there and stay there.
C: You took children from both ends of
the class spectrum, but all of them were
incredibly reflective and articulate — not
to mention funny. How did you find
those 7-year-olds back in 1963?
M.A.: We had only three weeks to find
all the kids before we started shooting,
so it was pretty arbitrary. We went to the
cities, to the city of London for example.
We went to the educational authorities
and we told them what we were look-
ing for. We went to working-class
schools and private schools, and I would
speak to the teachers and say, “Bring me
your finest 7-year-olds.” And they would
bring them in and I would look at them.
I knew nothing, but I did think that if
they wouldn’t talk to me they have no
chance of talking to a film crew…In fact,
whenever I do documentaries that are
character-driven, [I’m] looking for peo-
ple who can present themselves, who
can be articulate, who aren’t kind of
stuck for words.
C: What possessed you to do it again,
to interview them seven years later? In
sociology that would be an ambitious
project, first to find them and then to
persuade them to be re-interviewed.
M.A.: I wish I could say that it happened
immediately. 7 Up, when it came out,
was a huge cultural event. The political
issues were in the wind, and now they
were suddenly dramatized in this incred-
ibly accessible and entertaining way. The
response was enormous. I didn’t direct
the first film, Paul Almond, a Canadian
did it; I just found the kids. It took five
years before the guy that was head of
Granada Television, Dennis Forman, sat
down with me and said, “Why don’t we
go back and see how they’re all doing?”
You could see that we were on to some-
thing, here was a big idea.
C: Now you’ve interviewed them seven
times, and you presumably are planning
to do another, 56 Up. You’ve only lost
two of the original 14 people, and even
they may return. How do you persuade
them all to subject their lives to such
public scrutiny?
M.A.: There’s no formula for it. We keep
in touch, we talk to them, and send
Christmas cards. It’s like a family. Some
you see a lot of, some you never see at
all. Some I am close to, some I am not
close to. Some I know don’t like me very
much, some do—it’s exactly the dynam-
ic of the family. But one of the horrors of
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the longitudinal documentary is that you
are completely at their mercy. Some of
them insist on seeing it before I finish it
and give me notes on it. They argue the
notes like a studio would argue the cut
of a film with me. And there is nothing
I can do if they don’t let me use stuff.
C: How have your relationships with
them changed over the 42 years?
M.A.: It doesn’t get easier, it’s harder,
because there’s so much more emotion
involved in it, on all sides. There’s much
more connection between us, much
more sharing. As they get older, I am
older; I have lived through what they’re
“It’s like a family. Some you see a lot of, some
you never see at all. Some I am close to, some I
am not close to. Some I know don’t like me very
much, some do .”
living through. It’s more vivid but it’s also
much more stressful to do. When I fin-
ished shooting 49, I thought, “I don’t
think I can do this again, it’s wiped me
out.” But you get over that.
C: It is emotionally draining for you, but
what about the effect of the films on the
lives of the 14 of them?
M.A.: I can’t really analyze the deep psy-
chological effect it has on them. But I
know they haven’t got jobs from it, they
haven’t found partners because of it; it
hasn’t driven them mad. Still, it must be
a tremendous load to bear. I don’t know
if in between times they think about it
very much. All I do is ask the question
you asked me, which I can’t answer. I
just don’t know what it must be like
every seven years to put your life up for
this intimate public examination.
C: Your career has been amazing. The
Up series may be what you will be most
remembered for, but you’ve directed so
many other films, from box office hits
like the James Bond film The World is
not Enough (1999) and the spy thriller
Gorky Park (1983). Then there are the
more socially conscious films like Coal
Miner’s Daughter (1980) and your
recent Amazing Grace (2006). How does
making a documentary compare with
making a feature film?
M.A.: It’s an unusual career I’ve had. Not
many people go backwards and for-
wards the way I do. I remember when I
left Cambridge in ‘63 and Granada was
recruiting, everyone wanted to be a
drama director. Hundreds of us applied
and 30 went up to Manchester. I took a
look around and I could see all these
people who wanted to be in drama.
Although I had done plays at school I
thought maybe I should be a bit differ-
ent from the rest of them. I was inter-
ested in social issues from my mother’s
womb, she’d been a socialist and I was
very influenced by that, too. Reading
law made me very interested in social
issues as well. I was the only one who
did that, which I think is one of the rea-
sons they recruited me. Granada then
was a very left-wing company, they
completely rewrote the laws of televi-
sion journalism.
C: You are at heart a documentarian,
how does that affect your feature films?
M.A.: I approach fictional work with a
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documentarian’s eye and emotion. I
gravitate to those subjects, especially
biographies, where you can actually do
real research, films like Amazing Grace.
And even in a crazy way when I did the
Bond film, it was about getting gas and
oil out of the Caspian, so I said, “Well,
let’s go see how they do it,” and they all
thought I was crazy. So I dragged them
all out to Azerbaijan…because the
Russians had built this massive city in the
middle of the Caspian. So we shot some
stuff there and that became a wonder-
ful design for a section of the film. It was
that impulse to take the real thing and
try to build the fictional thing out of it.
I remember when I did Gorky Park
we got thrown out of Moscow. This was
pre-[Mikhail] Gorbachev, it was [Yuri]
Andropov, and they found out we were
researching and they slung us out. I felt
naked; I couldn’t find out what Russians
have for breakfast and things like that,
all the things that I love to find out, that
whole territory was closed to us. I was
incredibly unhappy throughout the
entire making of the film because I was
cut off from a source of information.
That taught me how dependent I
am on that documentary spirit. It’s a
whole set of different muscles. With
documentaries the difference is being
lighter on your feet, catching what you
can, knowing what isn’t going to work
and moving on, and knowing what
might work and continue with it and
then building it and writing it when you
have harvested the material, and then
writing it when you’ve started editing it.
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C: Sounds like
you’re a natural
sociologist, in
many ways. You’re
not insulted by
that label, are
you?
M.A.: No, I am
flattered by it.
Courtesy photo
C: Several spin-off
series are now
underway that
have copied your method, in Russia,
South Africa, and here in the United
States. Did it make a difference that the
directors knew from the start that these
would be longitudinal projects?
M.A.: Yes, it’s a different thought
process. Then you do sit down and say
“What’s going to happen in America in
the next 50 years?” For example, we
wanted to look at the breakdown of the
inner cities, so we did Chicago. And we
wanted to look at the ethnic makeup of
America, so we did Los Angeles. We
found a couple of gifted children in New
York and a couple of Southern children
and we did a Midwestern child. Actually,
we’re having some trouble with the
American one. More people have
dropped out of it, which surprises me,
because everyone in America wants to
be on American Idol, that’s the DNA of
the country.
C: And the Russian one is fascinating, as
it began with the break-up of the Soviet
Union. Right?
M.A.: The Russian one actually started
as the Baltic states were seceding. We
looked at the map of the Soviet empire,
because you could already see it was
going to disintegrate. So we chose them
geographically, we went everywhere,
from Kazakhstan to Siberia to the Baltic
states. And the South African one is
breathtaking, if for no other reason than
that three of them are dead. I can’t tell
you how powerful it is. All three of them
are brilliant pieces of film making, very
ambitious, very imaginative.
C: By comparison, 7 Up was more
improvised, done more from the seat of
the pants. Yet that is the one that every-
one knows about across the world. Why
do you think it has been so successful?
M.A.: The more they go on, the better
they get. The others may get there, too.
But the other reason that the Up series
has been so successful is because of
Granada Television. They’ve been there
for us every seven years. The American
7 Up started out on CBS, then it went
to Showtime, then it went to Discovery.
Network television doesn’t draw the
eyeballs anymore, there’s too much stuff
going on. You have to fight for expo-
sure. If it doesn’t bring in the kind of
money people might like, they say, “Oh,
maybe we don’t want to do it again.”
With Granada, the fact that they were
there, and that it was broadcast on net-
work television, seven years after seven
years, was critical. So I was given a solid
financier and solid exposure and these
films may simply not get that. I just
lucked out with Granada, I lucked out
with the instincts I had about the film.
And the people who did it turned out
great. Nothing’s perfect, but you look
around at the train wreck of your career
and you think, this one actually did work
out, it survived. I am very proud of it.
Michael Burawoy is in the sociology department
at the University of California, Berkeley. He chaired
the ASA committee that gave Michael Apted the
Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues.
Ruth Milkman is in the sociology department at the
University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author
of L.A. Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of
the U.S. Labor Movement.