Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2011

JAPAN TODAY

It’s not often a director has to watch his own movie again before he can talk about it at an interview. But in the case of the 2006 film Amazing Grace, which is finally being released in Japan this weekend, British director Michael Apted had to refresh his memory. That’s not surprising: for the past two years, he has been preoccupied with another movie, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. “The films we do today live on via DVD or the internet—much more than when I started my career in the 1960s,” said Apted, 71, best known for hits such as Gorky Park, Gorillas in the Mist and the James Bond film The World is Not Enough.

Amazing Grace is based on the true story of William Wilberforce (1759-1833), a passionate abolitionist who fought to get Parliament to outlaw the British transatlantic slave trade. The movie stars Welsh actor Ioan Gruffudd as Wilberforce and Albert Finney as John Newton, the slave ship captain-turned-clergyman who wrote the words to the famous hymn of the title. “What attracted me to this project was the politics more than the religious elements,” said Apted. “Politics throughout the world gets a bad rap, but here was an instance where a major change was made through a political event, rather than popular opinion. Not many people knew how this was the first big step to abolish[ing] slavery.”

Apted used largely unknown actors for the characters of Wilberforce, his wife and Prime Minister William Pitt. “I needed youthful stars, so what I did was surround them with marketable names like Michael Gambon, Rufus Sewell and Albert Finney. Ioan was great. Not only did he have the brooding look, but he could sing, too.”

While Amazing Grace was successful in America, it didn’t do so well in the UK. “Somebody in politics in London decided the film was racist because it didn’t deal with plantations and black brutality to black people,” said Apted. “He said it was just another film about white people saving the black man. Newspapers got hold of this and built up hostility which we never recovered from. On the other hand, America, which was much more involved in slavery, did understand what the film was about. I kept saying to the English press that there are loads of films about the slave trade—like Amistad—and that Amazing Grace was a look at it from a different angle.”

Apted acknowledged that there couldn’t be two more different films than Amazing Grace and his most recent movie. “We shot Narnia in 2D, but when Avatar was such a big hit, they wanted to convert it to 3D. I don’t know whether 3D is here to stay. Sometimes I feel it takes me out of the movie.”

Apted is one of the few directors who has successfully gone back and forth from TV to cinema to documentaries. “What I love about television is the energy—it’s not life or death. Movies like Amazing Grace are hard to get made, while big-budget films like Narnia can take up to two years in production. With TV, I always feel like I am going back to my beginnings.” His small-screen credits include Coronation Street in the ’60s, ITV Playhouse in the ’70s, and Rome in 2005.

Of his many documentaries, Apted is most famous for Up, a series that has followed the lives of 14 people in Britain since they were 7 years old. The project started in 1964, and Apted has made a documentary about the group every seven years since. “I’ll be shooting 56 Up this year,” he said. “It has been the subject that people most want to talk to me about.”

Chris Betros is the editor of Japan Today (www.japantoday.com).