INT: My name is Jeremy Kagan. Today is February 6th, 2013. I was about to say 19. And I’m conducting an interview with the esteemed Michael Apted for the Directors Guild of America Visual History Program. We are at the DGA in Los Angeles, California.

MA: All right. Michael David Apted. Name at birth was correct; it was the same. Nickname: none. Birthdate: 10th of February, 1941. Born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, in the United Kingdom.

INT: Were you aware when you were little at all of the war [World War II]?

MA: A little bit, because we were evacuated. My mother was evacuated. We lived in East London, middle class East London, and East London took a hammering during the war. And so my mother was moved out to have me, really, and she stayed out in Aylesbury [Buckinghamshire], which is about 30 miles out of London. My father was in an administrative job in the war. He didn’t go to a foreign field, he was--but they were separated, you know, he was in a barracks or whatever, doing admin and whatever. And both my--me and my brother were born outside during the war, so I remember it as sort of little memories of it being idyllic, you know, because it was a beautiful countryside, and we had no, you know, we were never threatened or whatever. So I have those odd memories of--and I’ve seen pictures, which have… But I do have a lot of memories of post-war, because then as soon as the war was finished, we came back in, and the whole place was a mess. You know, it was a wreck. There’d been so much bombing and whatever. And you know I have vivid memories of life in the post-war. I have an obsession with chocolate and butter, because they were extremely difficult to get, and you had to save your coupons to, you know, to get them. And so they were real luxuries. But I remember everything was bought with coupons, clothes and whatever. And I don’t remember it as a hard time; it was really the only time I knew. I was four, I suppose, in 1945 and all that, but I just remember the damage and the wreckage of the place, how much, you know, how much bomb sites there were, and all this, and how nothing seemed to be done. [INT: Did you play within them, or were you allowed to?] No, no. We sort of were in a more bungalow, suburban part of it; we weren’t in the middle of town, so we were sort of outside that. But you know, whenever I went into London or made trips like that, I never forget those images of, you know, the place just beaten up.

INT: One of the questions that you’ve asked, which I found a very effective question, is what’s the greatest gift your parents gave you?

MA: Education, I think. You know, I mean, I’ve passed that on in a sense. They put all their money into that and to--I had a brother, and then I had an adopted sister. I was the oldest of the three. They wanted, they didn’t want another boy, and my mother kept losing--had a lot of miscarriages, and they were all boys, so they adopted a daughter. But I mean, they put all their money, and my father was in fire insurance, so you know, he wasn’t making much money. And my mother, obviously, was just bringing up, getting pregnant, and bringing up children. And you know they put all the money they had into our education. [INT: Did they have as much education as you and your siblings got?] In a way they did. I mean my mother was a kind of tragic figure in a sense, insofar as she was a very bright woman, but she was the youngest of six. And so therefore, it was her job to stay on and look after my parents when all the others left. And so she never really had, you know, a proper education, and never had a proper career. She was really a housemaid when, you know, she left school, and then she did that to her early 30s, and then she married my father. But she was very bright woman, and I think had a considerable anger in her about the fact there was no career for her. She never had an opportunity. She could have handled a career. So although she wasn’t highly educated, she was very smart. But my father, he didn’t go to university, but you know, he had--I went to the school he was at, which was an independent school bang in the middle of London. And so he was pretty well educated.

INT: What did they [parents] want for you? Did they--or did they? Other than be educated, did they have ideals that you guys would be something?

MA: Yes, it was very clear, ‘cause it was to haunt us. I mean they wanted me to be a respected, middle-class citizen. And their dream for me as I went into school and into my teenage years was to be a lawyer. And you know, when I went into the entertainment business, they were shocked by this, and absolutely bereft. And it truly took them 10 years to figure out that it was a proper job. And I, I mean it was such a present thing that I was staying at--I went to the Edinburgh Festival this year, and I stayed with one of my cousins, ‘cause my mother was the youngest, all my relatives are much older. And she said she remembers her father discussing the terrible fate of me, of having gone up to Manchester for god’s sake, and was doing soap operas. It was regarded as a blight on the family. But mercifully they had both lived long enough to see that, you know, it was a proper job and I had done pretty well at it.

INT: Do you remember your first movies? Do you remember any of them?

MA: You mean as an audience? [INT: As an audience, first.] Well, yes, again, because that was a major event. I mean I went to Saturday afternoon movies and stuff like that, or Saturday evening when I was a teenager, largely to see girls. I mean when I was too frightened to talk to girls, so me and my friends would just, like, follow girls to the cinema. But I have no memory at all of any of the images and whatever. But then I went to school right in the middle of London, on Blackfriars Bridge, the City of London School, so I had access to theaters and cinemas, and I remember one wet afternoon when I was 15, I went to the Academy cinema on Oxford Street, which is sadly gone, and I saw Ingmar Bergman’s WILD STRAWBERRIES. And it was a total epiphany, because I was a big reader, I read a ton of stuff, and I was interested in literature and poetry and all that sort of thing. Here was something, a movie, that I thought had the gravitas and seriousness of a book, that it was a major piece of work, you know, it wasn’t just fluff, it wasn’t just popcorn stuff. And from then on I knew what I wanted to do. I mean, I had no idea how I could ever do it, because I had no connections with the Industry [Entertainment Industry] at all, but that was a major, my road to Damascus, in fact. [INT: And interesting about that one of all of Bergman’s pictures, because this was also not about youth. So for a young person to be affected by a story--] Well, maybe that was just the luck of the draw, but just the quality of it and the richness of it, you know, the whole dream element and all this sort of stuff. It was a total revelation. I was clearly ready for it, because you know, because I had read so much stuff in all this, part of my brain was educated in all this, and so I was ready for it, but… [INT: And what did you find, I mean now knowing that that particular movie actually had an effect on you, what’s the next step?] Well, the next step, really, which was sort of going along concurrently, in a way, was I was interested in doing school plays and things like that. I was interested in, you know, being on stage. And fortunately the school I went to, the City of London [City of London School], did very, very good school plays. We had an English teacher, who was sort of obsessed with it. And we put it on at the Guildhall School of Music [Guildhall School of Music & Drama], and, you know, we did two or three a year, and they were very, very professional. And I was in those, and so that was kind of really, you know, flowering my interest in the dramatic arts. And also, again, because we were right in the middle of London, you know, I would go to the theater a lot, either with the school or on my own, you know, and see all sorts of things, you know, major things that I never forget. So although we lived in the suburbs, and from the age of 10 I would travel up to school in the rush hour on the Underground, which, again was a huge experience, because for me, had I just stayed and gone to school in that suburban environment, I think I would have never developed into anything. But the fact that I was thrown into a metropolitan city at that early age, and had to fight my way to work and all this sort of stuff, and then have access to all this culture, and have access to drama at school, and then to begin to uncover the world of movies, which was European movies, you know, that was really the making of me.

INT: Who were some of the--do you remember some of the plays that you saw? Did any of them stick out?

MA: Well, yeah. I mean, I get all the years wrong, but I mean, you know, I saw Olivier [Laurence Olivier], and I saw, you know, Scofield [Paul Scofield] doing “King Lear”, I saw Brook’s [Peter Brook] A Midsummer's Night Dream” and all this sort of stuff, I mean, real iconic productions, and this was in my, you know, toward the end of my school years. [INT: And what kind of parts did you play? ‘Cause you said you were an Actor then, yes?] Well, I played Claudius in “Hamlet”, to a guy called John Shrapnel’s Hamlet, and he became an Actor. And my Gertrude was--‘cause it was a boys’ school, so, you know, became… I forgot what it was, a biologist or something. And someone who became captain of the England cricket team played Laertes, and things like that, so… But I’m just missing one bit of my cultural upbringing, because I learned to read by reading the radio listings. I was obsessed with listening to the radio, you know, comedy shows, musical shows and all this. And that came from my mother. One of my abiding memories, again, is whenever we went on holiday, me and my mother would go to the, you know, to the kind of the Follies thing, you know, the kind of seaside entertainments. My father and brother weren’t interested, but she and I would. And she loved it. You know, we’d see, you know, blue comedians and all this sort of stuff, and I loved that. And I mean, I loved being in the theater, and that was when I was really quite little. You know, before I was 10 years old, but that, really that love of popular entertainment, which became as kind of crucial for me as my career developed, I think that came to me quite early, that I liked popular stuff. I liked listening to popular things on the radio. I liked things that lots of people listened to, and I liked the popularity of kind of, you know, end-of-pier [popular entertainment featuring minstrel performances] stuff, and whatever. The kind of, the Bergman [Ingmar Bergman] element in the movies, ‘cause I had drenched myself in European cinema at the time, was slightly counterintuitive to who I was, but without jumping too far ahead, I mean, I got tired of European cinema and started to embrace American cinema because it was entertaining. [INT: Got it.] Because there were terrific movies, and there were lines around the block, which is really why I was drawn to come here. So there was a kind of vulgar part of my upbringing, you know, which is a very important part of it. I don’t want to run away thinking that, you know, I went to study Bergman [Ingmar Bergman] and all this sort of stuff. There was another side to what I really liked in entertainment that was very important in developing me. [INT: Who were some of the--and I realize this division, which is the popular entertainment that your mom exposed you to and you obviously really enjoyed, and the fact that you were also getting exposed to some of the greats….]

INT: Before you actually started to make movies, who else are there, or were there other Directors other than Bergman [Ingmar Bergman], that were…

MA: Oh, yeah. There was a ton of them. I mean, and again it was more movies than movie Directors. You know, I’ve always gone for what of my favorite movies, rather than who are my favorite Directors. But I mean there was the French New Wave. There was Godard [Jean-Luc Godard], and Truffaut [Francois Truffaut] and Resnais [Alain Resnais]. I remember the Italian Neorealists were very important to me. I mean I loved all that stuff. And Bunuel [Luis Bunuel]. I mean, you know, and this carried on when I was at university, because you know, there was an art cinema there, and all these films came in. And so between the age of 16 and 22, you know, I was really immersed in all European and Indian cinema too.

INT: Now when you were in university, were you able to express your creative side there? MA: Yes. I mean I joined in all the theatrical stuff. I mean, I joined… we did college productions, we did university productions, and, you know, my generation was rich with it. I mean, I was--did a production of--I was in “Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance” with--directed by Trevor Nunn, with Stephen Frears and Mike Newell and people like that, was a whole slew of us in there. Richard Eyre. It was endless. And I was very, very close with, I had all the Monty Python [Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin] people there; I was very close with John Cleese. We were at college together, we were in the same college, and we have stayed friendly ever since. So it was a, in terms of the entertainment business, it was a kind of vintage time. [INT: Did you know, or did any of you know at that moment, that all of the names that you just mentioned might in fact emerge within the creative fields that they all did? I mean, did you think Stephen Frears would be a filmmaker, or John Cleese would be the entertainer he became?] No, I don’t think--well I mean, Cleese was bizarre. I mean, he showed up for his first year with a big beard, and he was the son of a vicar, and he was incredibly quiet and whatever. Then it was as though he’d had a lobotomy, overnight he became the funniest man in England. I mean something clicked in him. He was a little bit older than us, and something clicked, and then he joined Footlights [Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club], and the rest was history. You know, Footlights became Monty Python, and blah, blah, blah, and all that sort of thing. No, I think we thought Trevor, Trevor Nunn seemed incredibly focused and ambitious, and Ian McKellan was there as an Actor, and he seemed to know what he was doing and all that. But I think the rest of us, I mean I had no idea how I was gonna carry on with this. I mean it seemed to be a complete blind alley. You know, they said well, when we were getting near the end of our university careers, and we really wanted to go into the theater, you know, you’d write letters and they’d say, “Well, nice to hear from you, but you know, until you get some experience, then let us know.” You know, how do you get experience? And so I think I felt doomed that this was not something that I was gonna be able to carry on with, that I would have to, you know, resign myself to being a lawyer. I’d changed subject, I’d done history for part one, for the first two years, and then I changed to law for the very reason that I thought I’d better have some credentials for a career, you know? This theatrical stuff was gonna get me nowhere, the theater stuff. And so I did a law degree, which turned out to be very, very interesting, a very useful, but convinced me this is not something I ever wanted to do for a living. But you know, to answer the question, I don’t think there was any sense that any of us would move on into that world.

INT: When you said writing letters [applying for acting jobs in theaters], because here’s--obviously you didn’t have the support of your parents to do this, even though I suspect they were entertained, I assume they came to some of your shows… [MA: Yeah, sort of, yes. Yeah, but that was fine. That was a university thing, but it wasn’t serious. School plays, and--] Right, this was avocational… So the effort to reach out to the community, that was-who would you write to? MA: Well, you’d write to theaters, you know, ‘cause there are all these rep [repertory] companies all over the country, and, you know, they had different grades of them, and some were pretty distinguished and whatever, and we had, you know, Cambridge [Cambridge University] particularly was kind of, you know, a developing a feel for people going into the theater, and so you’d--people who are older than you, you’d seen what they’d done, so you’d copy that, so you’d write to big theaters, you’d write to small theaters, and people were very nice but you never got the remotest interest. [INT: Now, were you heading for an acting career at…?] No, I directed plays there. I mean, I don’t think I was a very good Actor. I couldn’t--I would keep breaking up with laughter, I remember, in a production of, what was it? I think it was “Macbeth” or something I played something and it was terrible. And Trevor [Trevor Nunn] had directed, and we were on the road with it. We took it to Newcastle and places like that, and we would just break down in fits of laughter and have to leave the stage, and he got very upset with us. And, of course, we had thousands of school children watching and all this sort of stuff, but… No, I didn’t think I had a shot as an Actor, but I didn’t want that. I mean, I’d started directing little bits in my first year at Cambridge, and then it went on and then I did a couple of bigger productions, and whatever.

INT: Do you know what about directing, at that time, you liked? MA: Well, I think I got it from the movies. I think although the movies were a remote possibility, I think I saw the power of directing from the movies. I mean obviously, there were iconic Directors. I remember Peter Brook came down to Cambridge [Cambridge University] to give a sort of a little lecture and all that sort of thing, and we all ran up and said, "How do we get in the business, how do we get Agents?" And I remember he said to me, “Just do it,” said, “if you do it--do it on a street corner, just direct. Just do it.” “Oh, thank you.” So, but I think I got--because I was very interested in the cinema, I mean I knew a lot about it, so I… but then my practical side was in the theater. That’s what I was doing. But because of my studies of the films, you know, and there was no film school, so it was just a pretty recreational thing. You know, I obviously knew a ton about it. I knew what Directors did and all this sort of stuff, so, you know, that’s what was driving me, that kind of business of someone shaping it, someone having the ultimate responsibility for it, someone’s--it being someone’s vision was, you know, was I think what attracted me to it. And that was true in the theater, you know, as I said with these iconic Directors. It was with Peter Brook’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream”, it was so incredibly original, and blah, blah. [INT: Yeah, I remember it.] So, you know, I think I knew that’s what I wanted to do. [INT: When you were getting--‘cause there was no film school at this time, or if there was, I’m sure it was very limited, wouldn’t even know who knew about it, where were you gaining your knowledge about directing, or Directors, film Directors? Were you getting them from things like Cahiers du Cinema? What was, what were--] Yeah, I’d read magazines, Sight & Sound, and stuff like that. I’d read books on it, you know, and newspaper articles. I was just very interested in the process, you know, and in a sense, I suppose, in the glamour of the Director, ‘cause it seemed particularly in European cinema, as it would be in American cinema in the ‘70s [1970s], you know, the Director was very much, it was a Director-centric industry. And so, you know, that was, you know, more interesting than an Actor-centric--

INT: And how did you make, ‘cause here you’re studying law, now you know what you’d like to be doing. You’ve been advised by Mr. Brook [Peter Brook] to go do it. What’s the next step? MA: Well, the next step was this miracle that Granada Television [ITV Granada] existed in Manchester. They had been going--we were in ’63 [1963], they’d been in business since ITV started in competition to the BBC in about ’58 [1958]. And Granada [Granada Television] was operating out of Manchester, there were four or five other companies, regional companies, and Granada were trying to expand their horizons a bit, rather than steal all their stuff from the BBC or from journalism or from the theater, they set out to find people at universities and whatever, and to train them up as first generation television workers. And so, you know, it was very, I’m ashamed to say, elitist. You know, they sent the first man I’d ever seen in a pink shirt, Derek Granger, who was a luminary in his own right. He went round to Oxford [University of Oxford] and Cambridge [Cambridge University], and you know, he announced, “We’re here at the hotel,” and all of us went to see him, and you know, we had little interviews with him. And then they chose 30 of us; 15 say from Cambridge and 15 from Oxford, to go out to Manchester for two days where they put us through a kind of grilling. And then at the end of that, they offered six of us jobs. And Frears [Stephen Frears] was on that, and Newell [Mike Newell] was on that; we’re all about the exact same generation as moi. And that was the huge break. I mean, that was--and they didn’t do it every year, they did it every other year, and it was my good luck that the year I graduated was the year that they did it. And that changed my life.

INT: Why do you think you were one of the six [hired by ITV Granada]? MA: I know quite well why, ‘cause I was pretty fucking cunning. I could see that most of them wanted to be drama Directors. Now, because--and this is where the law comes in--I got very interested in the law and in politics, and in social issues through the law. You know, I studied that as part of my law degree. And I had become very interested in current affairs and stuff like that in politics, as well as my interest in the movies, and you know, I felt all these other guys here, they want to be, you know, Francois Truffaut or something like that. And so my pitch was to them, “Look, I’m very, also very interested,” which was sort of true, but it was also cunning, you know, “in documentaries, in news,” you know. And they said, “Like what sort of subjects?” And I’d prepared for that, so, you know, so I had my top five current affairs programs, of issues that I would like to do something about, which was genuine, but it was also cunning. And I think that’s why I got the job, one of the six jobs, because I was probably the only one who didn’t want to talk about Chekov [Anton Chekov] and all that sort of stuff, that actually discussed, you know, whatever the latest news story was, or trade unions or something like that. [INT: Did they then say, “Okay. Now we want you to do this kind of work?”] Well, they did the ultimately, but at the moment, it was a very strange training, because they didn’t have any money for it. I mean they were incredibly brilliant company. It was, you know, there was a period of about three or four years when they just ruled the roost. Everything good came out of Granada, and everybody was trying to catch up, the BBC and all this. But you know, they were very lean machine, and so all that we could do, the six of us, was really, we were, you know, we went to watch other people work. We, you know, we just sat in control rooms, we went out with other Directors, and all this. But after a time, you know, after about three or four months of that, then we were allocated onto other programs, and that’s when SEVEN UP! started. [INT: And from the Directors, you what? Was this the first time you were actually watching someone else do this job, direct?] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don’t think I’d ever seen a professional Theater Director work, no. I mean, I’d seen my peers work, but no, yeah.

INT: And do you remember anything you learned from any of them [Directors working at ITV Granada]? MA: Not really. I mean, it was-it’s a very, you know, television directing, which is obviously what it was, and it was all studio-based and it was all multi-camera. I mean there was very high-powered stuff. There was a season of Tennessee Williams plays that, you know, Directors, you know, at the time were legendary, Silvio Narizzano, Ted Kotcheff, people like that, you know, that people like that were doing. But I don’t know whether, what I learned from them except the process. And the process was very complicated because none of it was exactly done live, but it may well, as well have been. I mean, you weren’t doing it in a normal filmmaking way, you know, you were doing it in a studio and you’d come out at the end of the day with 30 minutes of stuff, so… But you know, it was just, I suppose what I remember is just the manner of it, that how they expressed their authority, you know. And I suppose what impressed me were people who were calm. You could see a lot of hysteria going on, and I could see probably it might have been necessary, but it seemed sort of counterproductive to me. I remember my images that I recall are the calmer images, the people who were calmer about what they did. [INT: Wow. That’s actually a very powerful thing to you had learned, even if you didn’t learn anything else.] Yeah, yeah.

INT: Did you--if you watch the division of time that they [ITV Granada Directors] may have spent, since obviously they’re getting that 30 minutes in that day, was most of the time about the actual sort of technical capturing of image, or was there equal time about performance? MA: Well, performance had already been dealt with. You know, it was a very strange business, and you know, I would do this for the first six or seven years of my career, which is you would rehearse in a rehearsal room with the Actors, and if you were doing, you know, a high-powered production, you’d be there for weeks, possibly. And then you had to somehow transfer this into technical language, i.e. you then had to design the shooting of the whole thing and plan it all out with maps and models, and all this sort of stuff. And then you took into the studio. And the studio was very compressed, but you’d had a lot of time to prepare it. So the rehearsal part, we probably never saw much of, in fact, we didn’t. I mean, that was privately done with--and probably if it was big time stuff, it was probably rehearsed in London and then brought up to Manchester for the technical stuff to be done, and then the thing to be shot. So it was more the technical side, you know, that we were engaged in. [INT: And you were ready, I assume you saw after a number of weeks or months that okay, I can take this on?] Yeah, and it was a bewildering world, and it seemed very difficult, but I, you know, I thought well maybe there is something, maybe I could be part of this, you know. But what happened to me was that I was moved into the current affairs area, which is what, you know, what I’d sort of set up, not necessarily because I wanted to be there, but nonetheless it got me a big fat foot in the door. And so then I was siphoned off, you know, into news stuff and current affairs stuff, and, of course, into the UP [SEVEN UP!] film.

INT: How did the UP [SEVEN UP!] film happen? Was this your initiative? MA: Not at all, no. There was a series called WORLD IN ACTION, which ran for, god, 30 or 50 years, I think. And it was a weekly current affairs program, and it was revolutionary. It was simply putting tabloid journalism on television. Up til then, everything had been very proper, it had been in The Times newspaper and whatever, Richard Dimbleby and all this sort of stuff, and it had all been good, but it had been very class-orientated, very proper, very restrained, very diplomatic. And then this crazy Australian, he was 28 years old, called Tim Hewat, attracted the interest of the Bernstein brothers [Sidney Bernstein, Cecil Bernstein] who owned Granada [Granada Television; ITV Granada], who had been in show business forever but were very political, very interesting men. And also, they had three or four wonderful people around them: Sir Denis Forman who was to run the BFI [British Film Institute] later on; Derek Granger and whatever. But anyway, they hired Tim Hewat. He was the editor of the Daily Express at 28, the northern Daily Express, and he came in and just revolutionized the whole thing. He just treated it like tabloid journalism in the best possible way. You know, he threw it to the audience. He was in the audiences’ faces. He found subjects to do that no one dare breathe about, and he revolutionized. He was a terrifying man. I mean I was only six years younger than him, but he was a terrifying man. And he had this idea for this film, you know, about the class system, and his idea was let’s take 20 kids, put the camera on a high building, look down, put them in a square, you know, down in the street there, and yell at them, “Those that think they’re gonna have a successful life, step forward,” you know. And then some would step forward, and then he would say, “Well then, let’s make a film and see what happens.” And they hired Paul Almond to direct it. Now Paul was one of these hot shot, big time drama Directors, who was--I think he had done a Tennessee Williams, and he was on the premises. They asked him to do it as a kind of a special. And they took two of us trainees on it, and we, you know, our job was to work with him. And our job became to find the children. And it was a very interesting dynamic, because of my interest in politics and interest in socialism and social subject; I was very committed about the subject, because I found the class system to be totally obnoxious. I, you know, had seen people, I was very lucky; I’d gone to a good school ‘cause my parents had put money into it. I went to a fine university, and I knew there were hundreds of people of my age who never got a shot. I was lucky; I got the shot. And it always angered me about English society, because you know, mine was almost fair compared with the treatment some people got. And so I had a real take on this. Now Paul, basically, wanted to make an arty film about being seven years old. And so there was a very interesting tension between him and me, and I sort of clearly reflected Hewat, although Hewat was never around for this, but--and it was well-meaning, but none of this, you know, I was--and I was child, you know, but I was very keen on pushing this issue about is this fair? You know, these dickheads who, you know, if you’ve seen the film, read the Financial Times, is it right that they get all these choices and other people don’t? But between the two of us, we got a very interesting balance. I mean we got actually a decent looking film, because WORLD IN ACTION was crude filmmaking. It was ridiculously crude. Cutting was like that, “Let’s have two foot of that, two foot of that, blah, blah.” And you know, because of my political passion about it, and I was really passionate about it, ‘cause I thought this is a great opportunity, and his elegance as a Director, you know, we actually made something which was watchable, but also had some balls to it. And so that’s how it happened, it was made pretty quickly and all that, and it really--and it was just one idea, it was one off, that’s all it was gonna be, just one film. And it, you know, it was a landmark.

INT: Now in the actual making of it, for example, even in the--I think your voice is in the interviews in with the kids--[MA: Barely, but now and again, yeah.] What had, I mean, as you and I both know, to get a kid to be honest, to be present, it takes a certain capacity in terms of the person who’s with the kid. Do you think this was natural instinct? Were you learning something from, let’s say, the first interview? I’m not talking about over all the years, but even within the time, even if it was a short time, that you saw, “Oh, I see this works and this doesn’t.” Were you learning any issues at that moment, or was it so fast that…? MA: I think it was so fast, and it was very straightforward and simple. I mean, when we picked the kids, you know, what I was looking for, I wasn’t looking for particular personalities, you know, I was looking for a representation of different class backgrounds, but I was also looking for people who wouldn’t be intimidated by it. And I thought, you know, there’s gonna be about six or seven people in the room, you know, with a camera pointing at a seven year old kid. Are they gonna fold, or will they be able to do it? So I think I was looking more for that, and I don’t think I really got the hang of the interview or whatever at all. I mean, I think it was a pretty formulaic thing, you know, there was like 20 questions you asked them; what do you think of girls; what do you think of money; what do you want to be when you grow up; and all this sort of stuff. And you know, sometimes they would go off on their own little track or sometimes you put a little group of them together. But no, I don’t think I was learning anything at that stage, really. [INT: But being able to recognize a kid that could handle it, do you know, was that…?] That must have been some instinct I had, because I had no real reason to know what it would take for a kid to be able to pay attention to it. But I must have had some sense that, of who would fold and who wouldn’t fold, and who would respond and who wouldn’t respond. And you didn’t necessarily want the loudest mouth; you perhaps wanted someone who might think for a moment before they gave the answer. [INT: And were you interviewing these kids with a group, or I mean, meaning were there three of you in an interview, or would you--were you one on one?] Well no, we had split up. I mean, Paul [Paul Almond] was every--was there all the time. I did all the south of England, and another trainee friend of mine, Gordon McDougall did the north of England. So I did all the south, but most of them turned out to be from the south, so we would be--we would set up the filming. I would set up the southern filming and then I would prepare the kids, and then the crew would come in and I would be there with the crew. And then I would move on, you know, to prepare the next one, and stuff like that. [INT: I guess the only other sort of part of that is as you were choosing the kids that you were choosing, was that just you or did...] Yeah. No, that was just me. I mean, because Paul was behind, I mean, and he pretty much went with who I chose, you know. Because again, it was all done very, very quickly. I mean we had about two or three weeks to do the whole thing.

INT: In this process at Granada [Granada Television], who were your mentors, if there were mentors from Granada? MA: Oh, they were all from Granada, yeah. I mean, you know, in these early days in the documentary world, you know, a lot of the people on WORLD IN ACTION, there was Hewat [Tim Hewat] and just a whole load of them, you know, who--there were five or six Producers, all of whom were doing WORLD IN ACTIONs. You know, and all of it, really. I mean it was an incredible place to be. They even--I mean, even things like light entertainment, they revolutionized. You know, they had The Beatles in. I mean, The Beatles, that was another profound experience, because I was in Manchester, they were in Liverpool, and this was the end of ’63 [1963], and there was this moment in time which I’ll never forget, where we knew something no one else knew. We knew that these were gonna be huge. And it wasn’t--and for about two months, we knew this. You know, they would be coming in to do songs on our local news program and all this, and you knew they were great. And it wasn’t being wise after that, and sure enough, you know, two months later they hit London, and the rest was history. But there was that moment, but the north of England was like that. I mean, the north of England was culturally the center of the United Kingdom, and in some ways, the United Kingdom was sort of, in many ways, the center of the world for a time, you know? There was all these Liverpool and Manchester bands. There was--sport was very big out there, writing was very big out there, theater was very big out there, Granada Television was way ahead, you know, the shining light of the media. It was all happening up there, and there I was.

INT: Sometimes when we’re--in the early parts of a career, the people who you get exposed to, like another Director, oftentimes set a pace, or set a way of being that even though you might meet a, you know, a brilliant person 25 years later, your patterns or our patterns have been set, because we’ve been exposed to whoever they were. Were there Directors in the narrative world that you were getting exposed to? MA: Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, there were two people. It may make me cry, you know, actually, to sit here, just to think about what they did for me. There was Derek Granger, the man in the pink suit who was to go on and run the National Theater with Olivier [Laurence Olivier], but I mean he, you know, he told me, you know, “Make it your own. Whatever you do, make it your own. Possess it,” you know. And that was a huge lesson to me. I mean, he told me that when I was starting doing soap opera, you know, CORONATION STREET and things like that. And I’ll never forget that. And there was the other one, Julian Amyes, you know, who said to me, and he was my mentor for some time, he was a famous British Director and he was an executive for Granada [Granada Television], he said, “There’s no right way to do this.” He said, “You can’t learn it, you just have to pick it up. You will find your way to do it; there is no right or wrong way to do it. There is your way to do it.” And that’s, to someone watching all these things and learning, it was pretty profound. And I never forgot either of those things. [INT: Do you think they freed you?] Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Made me respect all, even just to think about my own instincts, I suppose. Not how does Silvio Narizzano do it, or how does Laurence Olivier do it, or whatever, but gave me the freedom to figure out that how I would do it, even though I was a child, that that would be of some value, maybe not to anybody else, but to me. And those two pieces of advice, you know, I never forgot them to this day. [INT: Are both of them reflective, I mean are they shifts in the way you had been? Meaning that…] No, I think I was starting a whole new adventure, whole new--nothing like what I’d been before. I was in the--I’d never been to the north of England. I was in a whole different culture. It was this million miles away from Cambridge [Cambridge University]. Again, when we joined Granada, the first day we were given a tutor like, so we would be made to feel at home. And I knocked on the tutor’s door, and they said, “Come in,” and it was Michael Parkinson. And he said to me, “Are you the fucking trainee?” Well, that was--I’d never been spoken to in the halls of Cambridge like that. I mean, you know, I was in a whole new world. I mean, I was gobsmacked by the whole thing. And I mean he was a wonderful man, and he was very important to me too. You know, he became legendary in his time as well, but I mean I just think I was looking for any kind of signs in the road, you know, for how was I gonna deal with this, how I was gonna conduct this. This was so different from anything. [INT: So this really fractured the way you had been, if you will, raised. Particularly by the time you were in Cam--in school.] Yeah, I mean it sort of took apart everything I’d ever done, you know, the suburban household, the mother and the, you know, and the Follies, and then school plays, and then Cambridge and all that sort of stuff, and then this. We were in this, it was mayhem, chaos, but, you know, you knew it was brilliant. I mean you knew, I mean, it wasn’t I didn’t see it was brilliant, it was just setting everything to light, whatever they turned their hands to, they did well. [INT: But when someone says to you, a young man at this moment who you respect, make it your own… that moment, do you know who are yet? Who is “my own” that’s to make anything?] No. Well, I think it was, I think it was saying, you know, you take it to a deep level. I think he was saying to me, you know, “Listen but make your mind up. Don’t just do what you’re told. Just listen to it and digest it.” I don’t think he was saying to me, you know, “Whatever crazy idea you have, go do it,” ‘cause I was doing a bloody soap opera, so I mean what can you do? But I think it, you know, he told me that I’d be learning things and that I would form my own way of doing things. And both those men were telling me the same thing, make it your own and, you know, there is no right way. I mean, I remember Julian [Julian Amyes] saying this to us pretty early on, because, you know, we were there sitting, watching these great men do their things. And I suppose an instinct would have been, “Well, if he’s doing it like that, I’ll do it like that.” You know, and I don’t know whether he even thought about it, Julian, but he did come up. And I don’t know whether the others responded to it, but it was a profound influence on me, that, “Here we are showing you how the best people in the business are doing it, but this doesn’t have to be the way you’re gonna do it.”

INT: When did you get your first break of doing a narrative? MA: Well, that was--I mean, I was doing documentaries; I’d done SEVEN UP! I was on WORLD IN ACTION and all this, and now I thought the time had come to set the record straight. You know, I’d come to power in this sleight of hand, and I had to start doing drama, ‘cause that’s what I want. And it’s a very small company, and you’d have to do everything. We did everything. We did religious broadcasts, football matches, pop shows, because it was small, you know? Anyway, Newell [Mike Newell] had, because he was a drama Director, he had now started on his drama-directing journey, and he was doing CORONATION STREET. So I--Newell and I were living together, so we were very close and chummy, and all that sort of stuff, and he was going on a holiday. So I went up to the management, I went up to Julian Amyes, who was, ran the whole drama department, and I said, “Newell’s going on holiday. Can I do his three week stint?” You know, you did two hours in three weeks. And they said, “All right. All right, go and do it.” So I did, you know, and that was another big moment because I knew I could do it. You know, I did it, you know, you worked on the script, then you had rehearsal, and then you shot it, you know. And this thing had been going for six years; it was the biggest show in television. And the people in it were great, you know, I mean, you had some of the best Actors in England, and you had some of the most famous stars in England, you know, and I just was able to handle it. And I--[INT: Do you know why?] No, I mean, I don’t know. Someone--Bill Roache [William Roache] said to me, and he’s still on it, he said, “You’ve got a lot of dignity,” he said. I said, “Oh.” He said, “You’ll do well.” And then that was it, and then I had to go back into my other documentary world, but it had left an imprint on me, and obviously had a little imprint on them. And about six months later, they said, “Do you want to go on it? I mean do you want to leave doing documentaries and WORLD IN ACTION and go and do that?” And I said, “Yeah.” And then, you know, then I spent probably, I mean apart from doing 14 UP [7 PLUS SEVEN], 21 UP [21], I did 15 years of drama, working my up through Granada [Granada Television], doing a year on CORONATION STREET, then doing drama series, then starting sort of doing sort of groundbreaking work doing Granada Television films where I formed relationships with great Writers and great Actors, and then going freelance, leaving Manchester and going to London, and then starting to do movies as well as a bit of theater and television.

INT: As you look at those first 50, and this is gonna reflect where you are right now, but also that time too. What were the--dignity is one of them, I loved that, but what were--what are some of the qualities that you would, if you were starting to, “Okay, I have to list now, what are the qualities of a Director?” What kind of words would apply? MA: I don’t know. I mean, it sounds tedious, but I mean I think it’s always watch and listen, you know? Listen to people, I think. And dealing with Actors, listen. I mean doing a soap opera was a very wonderful way to learn, because it was so smooth it ran itself. I mean, even if you were a complete incompetent, the show would get out because everybody knew what to do, which was I sort of knew and that was slightly reassuring. But, you know, and I think my demeanor was helpful, ‘cause I didn’t go in and think I knew it all. You know, I would ask questions. I wouldn’t be frightened to say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” or, “How do I do this?” I was never--and then I saw that people would be responsive to that; rather I would watch other people go in and pretend they knew it all, and they didn’t know it all, and make fools of themselves. So I think I still do that, I don’t think I’ve ever changed that. But at that period, and working on a soap opera, you know, when I really didn’t know anything, but people, if you put yourself at people’s mercy in a way, they will be helpful to you. And I think I learned that, and it was good to do it on a soap opera, ‘cause you couldn’t really make serious mistakes. They would cover for you. But I think, you know, generally all the way through, that was one of my MOs [modus operandi].

INT: Did you find yourself shifting as you were doing the soap operas, and then moving into other kinds of dramas, and then even your first film, do you feel that there was a progression of knowledge gained, so that let’s say if you’d had that first film as your first experience, you would’ve been able to handle it? MA: Yeah, I’ve always felt really sorry for people who’ve never had a training, never had an education, people who--maybe Writers whose their first directing job is a movie. I mean, I wouldn’t know how to begin. I mean, you know as well as I do, it’s a thousand questions a day, you know. And you have to be prepared to say, “I don’t the answer to that question,” and I think that was a major--that 15 years I spent was a huge learning experience for me, and you know, to my credit I was prepared to keep learning. I never thought at any point that I’d cracked it. I felt I could do it, I felt that from the beginning that I was comfortable with it. Whether I could pull it off, that was another matter, but I felt that I could do it. Those first few weeks that I spent with those Actors, I felt I could do it. But no, I think it was a huge learning experience, and honestly I don’t think it ever ended. I mean, I think it’s still going on. [INT: Yeah, I think it. In fact I know it’s still going on. I don’t think anybody who thinks they actually know it, that’s when they should say they should put their spurs up. But you actually got the practical training, I remember someone saying something about the Hollywood at one time did that as well, so if you look for example at John Ford, just picking him as an example, I mean he made endless pictures for the studios. And many of them are bad pictures, but this was the training ground, because they kept them on and they really realized that that was gonna be a process, which is gone now. I mean film schools have replaced it, but you were lucky to be right then and there, and actually consequence.] Yeah, and it was truly on the job training. You knew there was that tension that you actually were doing something that was going to be out there.

INT: Over that particular period of time, before your first picture, did you find yourself enjoying one area of directing more than others? In other words, were you having more fun working with your Actors than dealing with, let’s say the issues of camera and capture? Did you… MA: I think so. I think that sort of, you know, in a sense be a shortcoming. I mean, I always gravitated more, I found my relationships with the Writers and the Actors more nourishing than I did, you know, with the DP [Director of Photography] or whatever. I mean, I enjoyed working with Production Designers, I learned that, but I think I always kind of--I don’t know, why be judgmental on myself, but I think I was more interested in that part of it, more interested in the storytelling part of it, and I didn’t necessarily see the visual side of it as storytelling. I think that came to me with a kind of shock, you know, when I did my first movie. I did my first movie in 1972. I’d started on CORONATION [CORONATION STREET] in 1966, and then I’d gone through Granada [Granada Television] and I’d left Granada, and I got the film because it was a film called TRIPLE ECHO [THE TRIPLE ECHO] with Glenda Jackson and Oliver Reed. And Glenda was at the height of her power, she’d just won one Academy Award and was gonna go on and win a second, but she was only available for six weeks. And so the people who were mounting the film thought well, “We don’t want Schlesinger [John Schlesinger] or Karel Reisz or Lindsay Anderson. They’ll be there for years doing this. We’d better get someone from television who can do it quickly. And I was doing quite well in television at that time, so you know, I was young, and you had to be quick doing television, so that’s how I got the job. And so that was--but that, then I had to really wake up and think, because then I had, you know, world-class cameramen and all this kind of stuff, and… [INT: To be starting your first feature with two giant Actors, were you intimidated at all?] Brother, was I. And it was a frightening experience. [INT: Was Oliver in one of his…? Having worked with Oliver, I just know…] You have? [INT: Yes, I have.] Yeah. Well, what was so interesting about it was, and I was totally at sea, you know, she was very contained, very nice woman, lovely woman, very contained, loved to rehearse, and did it. You know, two or three takes, done. Oliver would show up, he wouldn’t even know what we were doing. He had no idea what we were doing. And so then I had a scene with the two of them. She was ready to go. He had no clue. He wouldn’t even have a sense of the lines by take 10, and I was just completely floored, because--and I only got through it because she was so kind. You know, she saw what was happening. But I also learned a lot, and I also learned a lot that maybe hers wasn’t necessarily the best way to do it, that there was something that Oliver was doing that was great. You know, Oliver had--he didn’t know what he was doing, but he came on and he kind of responded to what was there. He’d look at the set and all this, and he’d look around and all that, and he’d sort of suck it all up and then he’d start to do it, and it would start to come to life. And you know, the torture for me was it would take lots of takes for him to get it right, even remember it, let alone--and by that time she was worn out. But she did understand what was going on, but it was a terrific lesson for me, if it was brutal. I mean, I hated going to work every day, because it was torture, ‘cause we--you know, I had 30 days to do it with these two, in the United Kingdom, superstars. They were both sort of at odds. He was desperate to get me drunk. There was me, little me with my little middle class accent, he was desperate to--and he did, he got me completely blind. I knew I had to go through that; he had to do it. But you know, somehow we got through it, but it was a great--again, it was a frightening experience, but it was a very powerful experience. [INT: It’s important where you say you knew you had to go through that. Was it because--why did you know?] No, this happens to me, this happens to you. There are certain things, people want you do something, they want to embarrass you, they want to humiliate you, and you do it. You know, I mean, he just wanted to take me out and pour me full of liquor so I was insensible. [INT: But did he--did you do it--here’s the level that I’m asking you, did you do it on the level of, “If I do this, there is an opportunity for us,” meaning creatively, “for Oliver and me now to get to another level?” So this is not something I want to do, but…] Exactly. No, no, I didn’t want to do it at all. And I remember when I did NELL, Jodie [Jodie Foster] was obsessed with me hula dancing in a Hawaiian thing, for some inexplicable reason. There must have been some reason for it, and I knew I gotta do it. Because again, I mean, you know, it was embarrassing not to do it in front of everybody, but certainly with Oliver, I thought it might take us to another level. And I don’t know whether it did or not, but that was my process, thought process.

INT: You did say that because of your education, because you’re a reader, the issue of story already was something that you were connected to. Did you have some concept, and I don’t know if you were even taught this, about what made a good story? I mean, again this may be instinctual. I know you’ve grown to know it, versus someone was actually teaching you at one time whether in… MA: No, I think I learned that. I mean, I think it was one thing getting stories out of books. I think it was a whole other thing seeing how you could transpose those, you know, into adaptations or create them for the film medium. So I think that was a learning process, and again, you know, it was good fortune that when I started this process after I’d--even on CORONATION STREET, there were very good Writers on it that I formed close relationships with some of the best Writers, you know, in the United Kingdom for over a decade or so. And I think I learned a lot from them. You know, I learned… And you know, also there seemed something different about them. I mean I knew theater Writers, people, good ones, David Hare, people like that. But, you know, there’s something very proper about them, you know, in the theater, in the theater writing and all that sort of thing. They’re wonderful Writers and they’re good chums and all that, but working with these television Writers, these guys who had started out writing soap operas and then started to write plays and whatever, you know, you learn something more about that it was an organic medium, that it was something that was growing all the time, that you just didn’t write a beautiful scene with beautiful words, and then shot it like that. That there was--but I learned that more, I got good grounding in that in my time up in the north of England. But it really came to fruition, and I’m jumping ahead, we’ll go back to it I’m sure with COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER, with Tom Rickman [Thomas Rickman]. He taught me a huge amount. But I got the groundings of what would make good television, good film writing I think, in my early days in Manchester. [INT: Natures of story, if you sort of--you know, again, realizing because I’ve done interviews before, I know that sometimes to be--to have a perspective on what we do is not always what we have. We are in the midst of it, and our creative juices are actually doing it, and we’re not necessarily witnessing the process of how we do it. But in dealing with story, because you have the time and you actually are in dialogue with one or maybe two other people, if you do it in sometimes groups, but obviously not very often…] You’re talking about writing as opposed to… [INT: Yes, exactly. So what, when have you become to understand makes a good story?] Well, I can only answer it, maybe I can answer it better, but my instinctive answer is that what I was learning from these guys, and I don’t forget I’d done a ton of theater and all this, you know, that the text wasn’t sacred. I mean, it was sacred if you were gonna do HAMLET, but if you were gonna do a play, an original play, you know, the text should be organic, and it should--whatever, and I mean it’s really the--what I was learning was the whole power of the second draft. I mean, that didn’t really enter my culture when I was doing all these plays, and all that sort of stuff. It was the fact that stuff could be worked; stuff could be changed. Now that may be not the question you’re answering, but I think it speaks to me particularly, because I’ve never written stuff. I’ve never had the nerve to do it, so I’d never really created a story. I’ve always been interested and obsessed with the execution of a story, or the process of a story. How do you make a story come to life? You know, whether it--how do you make an Actor come to life? How do you make the text come to life? Because I’ve never had any real, real ambition to write myself.

INT: In that process though, there are times when you’re being given lots and lots of scripts to read. What is it that’s said to you about a story, and maybe this has taken--you might say, “Well, when I was 30 it was that, and then when I’m 50 it’s this,” that made you say, “I want to do that movie,” as distinguished from the 10 others somebody’s sending you? MA: Well, it’s interesting, ‘cause I’m very clear about that now, but I may not have been clear about that. I mean, I suppose it’s the work, you know, as I’ve learned and developed and all that. I mean what I always look for is a central relationship, even if it’s not fully executed. I feel whether I’m doing a Bond film [THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH] or whether I’m doing an action film, or whether I’m doing a political film, there has to be some emotional center to it, over on which everything can hang. It doesn’t have to be a man and a woman; it can be anything you want. But I’ve always--when I read scripts now, I always go for that. I’ve always gone for something that has some emotional traction in it, because I think you can only tell stories through people and through relationships, otherwise they become objectified. Now whether I knew that early on, I don’t know. I think what I was learning early on, right up through Tom Rickman [Thomas Rickman] and that was really that it was a living thing, that when I was rehearsing with Actors and the Writer was there, you know, they could redo stuff and the whole process was a collaborative thing between me, the Actors, and the Writer. That’s what I was learning then. And maybe this identification came somewhat later, I don’t know, but I had to make the step from regarding the text as sacred, which is a very English thing, and Actors have this problem because we’re all trained in the theater, and our literary tradition is second to none in the world, I think. So we have to get over that at some point, and I think it took me quite a long time to get over that, and to see the dignity in actually doing it another way.