Apted, Michael

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    Nicholas Hitchon, Who Aged 7 Years at a Time in ‘Up’ Films, Dies at 65

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    He was one of the original children profiled in “Seven Up!,” a 1964 British documentary, and reappeared in subsequent installments for more than a half-century.Nicholas Hitchon, whose life was chronicled in the acclaimed “Up” series of British documentaries, beginning when he was a boy in the English countryside in 1964 and continuing through the decades as he grew to become a researcher and professor at the University of Wisconsin, died on July 23 in Madison, Wis. He was 65.A posting on the university’s website announced his death, from throat cancer. In the most recent installment of the series, “63 Up,” in 2019, he described his struggles with the disease.Professor Hitchon was a student in a one-room primary school in Littondale, north of Manchester, when a researcher working on a Granada Television project came looking for a 7-year-old willing to participate in what was originally viewed as a one-shot TV special. Young Nick was only 6, but he was talkative and unintimidated by cameras, so he was signed up as one of 14 youngsters to be profiled.The idea was to get a cross-section of children from Britain’s economic classes, look at their schooling and other experiences and capture their perspectives on the adult world. Nick represented the rural child. He endeared himself to that original television audience with his response to an interviewer who, clearly fishing for cuteness, asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”“I don’t want to answer that,” Nick said. “I don’t answer those kind of questions.”The 1964 film, a simple effort titled “Seven Up!,” directed by Paul Almond, began to transform into documentary greatness when one of his researchers, Michael Apted, picked up the thread at the end of the decade and made a follow-up, “7 Plus Seven,” interviewing the same children.Mr. Apted, who died in 2019 at 79, directed that and all the subsequent installments, which were made at seven-year intervals. They became a fascinating portrait of ordinary people growing up, changing and reflecting on their lives.“What I had seen as a significant statement about the English class system was in fact a humanistic document about the real issues of life,” Mr. Apted wrote in 2000.Over the years, Professor Hitchon expressed both admiration for what the series was accomplishing and discomfort with being a part of it and with the way it was edited.“I’ve learnt that the stupider the thing I say, the more likely it is to get in,” he told The Independent of Britain in 2012, when “56 Up” was released. “You’re asked to discuss every intimate part of your life. You feel like you’re just a specimen pinned on the board. It’s totally dehumanizing.”He also thought the filmmakers had a tendency to play up stereotypes of British society, something he said he felt even as a boy in the early installments, when crew members would chase sheep into the camera’s view while filming him.“These people thought that I was all about sheep,” he told The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2005. “I’m quite fond of sheep, but I was more interested in other things.”If the series seemed too intent on demonstrating that economic class was a determining factor throughout life, Professor Hitchon — who went from a one-room rural schoolhouse to a Ph.D. and a life of academic accomplishment — proved to be an exception.“He’s one of the success stories,” Mr. Apted told the education journal in 2005.Professor Hitchon teaching a class in electromagnetism and conductivity at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He said the director Michael Apted would sometimes ask him about his work. “When I try to explain,” he said, “his eyes glaze over.”Michael Forster Rothbart/UW-MadisonWilliam Nicholas Guy Hitchon was born on Oct. 22, 1957, to Guy and Iona (Hall) Hitchon, who had a farm in Littondale. He studied physics at Oxford University, earning a bachelor’s degree there in 1978, a master’s in 1979 and a Ph.D. in engineering science in 1981. Soon after, he left for the United States to teach at the University of Wisconsin, a move that he thought “28 Up” (1984) had wrongly portrayed as abandoning his home country in pursuit of money.“He took us out to West Towne” — a Madison mall — “and had us walk around over and over again,” Professor Hitchon told The Capital Times of Madison in 1987, speaking of Mr. Apted. “Then he did a voice-over where he talked about that I’d come to America for a salary of $30,000.”Professor Hitchon pursued research on nuclear fusion, then switched to computational plasma physics. Once in a while, Mr. Apted would ask him about his work.“When I try to explain,” Professor Hitchon told Physics Today in 2000, “his eyes glaze over.”He published more than 100 journal articles and three books, the university’s posting said. He retired in 2022.His first marriage, to Jacqueline Bush, ended in divorce. He married C. Cryss Brunner in 2001. She survives him, along with a son from his first marriage, Adam; and two brothers, Andrew and Chris.If Professor Hitchon was sometimes uncomfortable with the “Up” project, he stuck with it, while a few of the other original participants dropped out. In “42 Up” (1998), he even joked about its role in his life.“My ambition as a scientist is to be more famous for doing science than for being in this film,” he told Mr. Apted on camera. “Unfortunately, Michael, it’s not going to happen.” More

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      What Happens Now to Michael Apted’s Lifelong Project ‘Up’?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat Happens Now to Michael Apted’s Lifelong Project ‘Up’?His documentary series chronicled the lives of its subjects every seven years since 1964. Now the participants ponder whether it can carry on without him.Michael Apted in 2012. His death last week left the fate of his decades-long project up in the air.Credit…Robert Yager for The New York TimesJan. 14, 2021Every seven years or so for more than half a century, the filmmaker Michael Apted returned to what he referred to as his life’s work: documenting the same ordinary people he’d known since they were 7 years old.Throughout nine installments of the “Up” series — which has been called the noblest, most remarkable and profound documentary project in history — Apted turned a restrained lens on class, family, work and dreams, both dashed and achieved, in his native England. The programs, beginning with “Seven Up!” in 1964, went on to inspire international copycats and even an episode of “The Simpsons.”So when Apted died last week at 79, he left behind not only his enormous artistic undertaking, but a nontraditional family unit that was at once uncomfortable, transactional and as intimate as could be.“It’s a bit surreal,” said Jackie Bassett, one of 20 schoolchildren originally featured in the series, who went on to become part of the core group that appeared every subsequent time. “He knew us so well,” she said in an interview, and yet she’d had no idea that the director was seriously ill.Jackie Bassett, Lynn Johnson and Sue Sullivan in 1964 in the original film.Credit…BritBoxBassett, left, and Sullivan flanking Apted and the producer Claire Lewis together for the most recent installment, released in 2019.Credit…BritBoxIn “63 Up,” from 2019, she processed on camera some of her decades-long frustrations with Apted’s handling of gender.“We had our moments,” said Bassett, a working-class grandmother from East London who now lives in Scotland. “But it’s a bit like having a favorite uncle that you fall out with occasionally, yet it doesn’t alter the relationship. He introduced me to a life that I otherwise wouldn’t know anything about.”Tony Walker, once a voluble boy who hoped to become a star jockey and instead became a taxi driver, said Apted was like a brother to him. “He’s always been there,” Walker said, choking up. “We never, ever thought it would come to an end.”Now, in addition to the 11 remaining participants — one regular, Suzy Lusk, opted out last time and another, Lynn Johnson, died — Apted’s longtime collaborators are also pondering the fate of a project that has spanned their professional lives.Claire Lewis, who started as a researcher on “28 Up” and later became a lead producer, said that Apted had always been “very proprietorial” about the series. But she recalled that on the press tour for “63 Up,” as it became clear that the director was becoming more frail and forgetful, he told a Q. and A. audience, “I suppose she could do it,” gesturing to Lewis.Tony Walker at age 35. He is interested in continuing to film the series.Credit…BritBox“I could carry it on,” Lewis said, adding that it would come down to the subjects’ assent and the health of the crew. The cameraman, George Jesse Turner, and sound engineer, Nick Steer, have been with the program since “21 Up,” from 1977; the editor, Kim Horton, joined for “28 Up.”“None of us are spring chickens — we’re all geriatric, honestly,” Lewis said, citing her own age as “70-ish.” “We’re going to need an ambulance, if we ever did it again, to take us all around. I think we’ll just have to say we’ll wait and see.”Asked if she would participate without Apted, Bassett began to cry. She agreed that Lewis, who’d long had the job of keeping in touch with the cast between shoots, was the logical successor. (Walker concurred and was more enthusiastic about continuing.)“70 and 7 do have a good symmetry,” Bassett said. “It would definitely have to be the last one for everybody.”Mortality had already hung over the most recent installment. Another subject, the engineering professor Nick Hitchon, who started as a bashful farmer’s son from the Yorkshire Dales, learned he had throat cancer and struggled through his portion of filming.Apted was “a fixture in my life,” Hitchon said in an interview from Wisconsin, where he moved to teach in the early 1980s. “Despite the fact that we’re not good at communicating as Englishmen, I did feel some closeness to Michael,” relating to him more and more with age, he said.It was important for the “Up” series to see life through, from retirement to death, Hitchon said. But he preferred not to contemplate his own future participation. “To be honest, if I’m alive at 70, I will be very, very glad,” he said.The “Up” series began as a one-off program for the current affairs show “World in Action,” on Granada Television. Apted was at first a young researcher, tasked with helping pick the children, and a casual suggestion from an executive to check in on them seven years later gave the project new life.At work on “63 Up”: Lewis, left, Apted, the cameraman George Jesse Turner, Paul Kligerman, Naomi Mendoza, Susan Kligerman, Terry Chadwick, Mikhaela Gregory and David Rose.Credit…BritBoxAlong the way, Apted became a Hollywood director, helming projects as varied as “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and entries in the James Bond and “Narnia” franchises. He was also “begrudgingly referred to as the godfather of reality television, something he clearly objected to over the years,” said Cort Kristensen, Apted’s assistant-turned-producing partner.“He cut his teeth making news programs and then got into scripted drama after that,” Kristensen said, “and he loved using the skills of both to enhance the other.”“Up” was also a document of technological progress. Horton, the editor, recalled going “from splicing tape all the way now to pressing buttons,” with hours of footage kept on a hard drive the size of “a pack of cigarettes in my pocket.”Yet the series has remained stubbornly straightforward, with spare narration and no music or modern techniques. It is optimized for watching every seven years, not bingeing, with plentiful catch-up footage repeated each time.“Every seven years we’d get a new commissioner and a new executive producer, and they all come into the program thinking they’re going to make some change,” Horton said. “Michael saw them all off,” at first politely and then with a colorful two-word phrase.His collaborators said that should they continue without him, this essence would carry through. “Michael felt very, very, very strongly that it must remain as it is,” Lewis said, noting that the director hated “tricksy, artsy-fartsy” documentaries.“His preference was simplicity, elegance,” she said. “It was about people and what they say and who they are. It was all about the stories.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Michael Apted, Versatile Director Known for ‘Up’ Series, Dies at 79

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMichael Apted, Versatile Director Known for ‘Up’ Series, Dies at 79His output included “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and a James Bond film. But he was best known for his long-running documentary series about life in Britain.The director Michael Apted with, from left, Jackie Bassett, Lynn Johnson and Susan Davis, three of the subjects of his documentary “28 Up” (1984), the fourth in a series that began with “Seven Up!” in 1964 and followed the lives of a group of British people in roughly seven-year intervals. (Ms. Johnson died in 2013.)Credit…Granada TelevisionJan. 8, 2021, 7:01 p.m. ETMichael Apted, a versatile director whose films were as varied as the James Bond picture “The World Is Not Enough” and the biographical dramas “Gorillas in the Mist” and “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and who made his most lasting mark with the “Up” documentary series, which followed the lives of a group of British people in seven-year intervals for more than a half century, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 79.His agent in the United States, Roy Ashton, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Mr. Apted, who was British, was a researcher at Granada Television in England when he helped pick the 14 children, all of them 7, who became the subjects of “Seven Up!,” the initial documentary in the “Up” series, which was directed by Paul Almond and shown on British television in 1964.The film was intended as a one-off, but Mr. Apted picked up the ball seven years (more or less) later, acting as director of “7 Plus Seven,” broadcast in England in late 1970, in which he interviewed the same children, now at a more developed stage of life.Then came “21 Up” in 1977, “28 Up” in 1984 and so on, with new installments arriving every seven years, all directed by Mr. Apted. “63 Up” was released in 2019.Collectively, the films became a serial portrait of a group of ordinary people advancing through life, from childhood through adulthood, charting their different paths, changing perspectives and various fates (one participant, Lynn Johnson, died in 2013). The New York Times in 2019 called it “the most profound documentary series in the history of cinema.”The intent of the original program in 1964 was to look at different segments of Britain’s class system. Thanks to Mr. Apted’s persistence, “Up” became something more.“I realized for the first time, after 20 years on the project, that I really hadn’t made a political film at all,” he wrote in 2000. “What I had seen as a significant statement about the English class system was in fact a humanistic document about the real issues of life.”Mr. Apted in Los Angeles in 2012. His “Up” series, The New York Times said in 2019, was “the most profound documentary series in the history of cinema.”Credit…Robert Yager for The New York TimesManohla Dargis, summarizing “63 Up” in The Times, wrote, “There’s great pleasure in revisiting this series, seeing who turned out just fine and sometimes better than you might have expected or hoped.”While revisiting “Up” periodically across six decades, Mr. Apted worked in television and commercial film.“Agatha” (1979), a fictional drama about the novelist Agatha Christie, starred Vanessa Redgrave in the title role. Mr. Apted had particular success in the 1980s, beginning in 1980 with “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” about the country singer Loretta Lynn, played by Sissy Spacek, who won the best-actress Oscar.Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn in Mr. Apted’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1980). She won an Oscar for her performance.Credit…Universal StudiosThe next year he directed the John Belushi-Blair Brown comedy “Continental Divide”; two years later came the crime drama “Gorky Park,” based on the Martin Cruz Smith novel, starring William Hurt. In 1988 there was “Gorillas in the Mist,” the story of the naturalist Dian Fossey; its five Oscar nominations included one for Sigourney Weaver, who played Ms. Fossey.Mr. Apted’s 1990s films included “Thunderheart” (1992), a thriller with Val Kilmer, and the drama “Nell” (1994), a vehicle for Jodie Foster. Then came his entry in the James Bond franchise — “The World Is Not Enough” (1999), with Pierce Brosnan as agent 007.In a 2010 interview with The Times, Mr. Apted reflected on his one regret about the “Up” series — that his initial choice of children was unbalanced, 10 boys but only 4 girls — and how his choices of mainstream films might have been a way to compensate for that.“The biggest social revolution in my life, growing up in England, has been the change in the role of women in society,” he said. “We didn’t have civil rights and Vietnam in England, but I think that particular social revolution is the biggest thing, and I missed it by not having enough women. And because I didn’t have enough women, I didn’t have enough choice of what options were in front of women who were building careers and having families and all this sort of stuff.”He continued: “Looking at everything from ‘Agatha’ through ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ from ‘Nell’ and “Continental Divide,’ they’re all to do with women’s role in society and what women have to do to have a role in society, or the choices women have to make to stay in society or have a voice in society, in both straightforward and eccentric ways. That’s always interested me. And that, I think, stems from the feeling that I slightly missed out.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.A complete obituary will appear shortly.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More