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 longitudinal 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 class system, the waste of people, the prejudging. Every society has a class system, 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 encouraged. And it’s so wasteful when it isn’t or when people just don’t get an opportunity. So that emotion has always propelled 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 interested in the political context. Also by then the political context had less meaning 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.
C: C. Wright Mills once characterized sociology as the intersection of biography and history. How did history come in?
M.A.: I have taken some punishment for never putting it in a real historical context. I tried it once or twice, and it was catastrophic. It didn’t really fit. In the end, their lives are the political statements, not their opinions about external political events.
C: The politics may have receded, but the sociology remained central. The epigram 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 background?
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 looking 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 people 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 incredibly 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 something, 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 dynamic of the family. But one of the horrors of 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.
