The man who made James Bond grow up
Filmmaker behind innovative Seven Up! documentary series had eclectic career
Michael Apted, 79, the innovative filmmaker behind the Up documentary series that chronicled a group of British people for more than 50 years, and also made such varied feature films as Coal Miner's Daughter and The World Is Not Enough, died Jan. 7 in Los Angeles. The cause was undisclosed. Apted's training as a documentarian lent an unfussy naturalism to an eclectic Hollywood career, and for four decades the English-born Apted helmed 21 feature films in a variety of genres — from the Cold War thriller Gorky Park (1983), starring William Hurt, to the family blockbuster The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010), his highest-grossing hit.
Many of his best-known films featured strong female leads, and he directed several actresses to Academy Award recognition. Sissy Spacek won an Oscar for her performance as Loretta Lynn in the 1980 biopic Coal Miner's Daughter. Sigourney Weaver was nominated for playing real-life primatologist Dian Fossey in Gorillas in the Mist (1988), and Jodie Foster as a girl growing up in the North Carolina woods in Nell (1994).
Seven Up! examined the different socioeconomic backgrounds and presumed trajectories of 14 boys and girls from London. Its thesis was an old Jesuit saying: “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.”
Apted selected several of the participants, including Tony Walker from the lower-class East End of London, who became a cab driver.
The film aired on British television in 1963 and was an unexpected phenomenon, a groundbreaking piece of cinema vérité and social anthropology. Every seven years, from 1963 to 2019, he dropped back in on the kids as they became an upper-class politician, a humble librarian, a science teacher who moved to America, creating an unprecedented diary not just of his subjects' lives, but of Britain itself, and even the world. The Up series, which Washington Post journalist Mary Jo Murphy deemed in 2020 “the greatest documentary ever made,” prefigured reality television and pop culture's obsession with the ups and downs of real people, but did so with far more sophistication and integrity.
After branching out into fictional storytelling on British television, Apted soon followed his boyhood dream to Hollywood. He found success as a journeyman filmmaker with a somewhat invisible hand. Apted was approached to direct a James Bond film in 1999: “They were very worried that they could not attract women into the Bond franchise,” Apted told La-la Land Records in 2018.
The World Is Not Enough came out on the heels of Apted's latest Up chapter, 42 Up, and in a New York Times review, critic Janet Maslin wrote: “Doggone if Apted hasn't been able to make James Bond grow up a little, too.”
The nine Up films became exhausting, and Apted mused that each might be his last. “I think it's a question that I won't have to answer,” he told NPR in 2019, “because the question is if I drop dead — which is not unlikely, actually, between now and the next seven years. So I've kept it open. It'll be something that I gave to television — no one will ever take that away from me.”