By Chris Betros

Arts & Culture Mar. 06, 2011 - 05:32AM JST ( 3 )

TOKYO —

It’s not often that a director has to see his movie again before he can talk about it. But in the case of the 2006 film “Amazing Grace,” British director Michael Apted had to refresh himself, not surprising since he has been working on his latest film, “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” for the past two years.

“When I looked at it again, it struck me how all the films we do today live on via DVD or the Internet— much more than when I started my career. In the 1960s, a film played in theaters, then was shown on TV and it disappeared after that,” said Apted, 71, who is best known for films such as “Gorky Park,“ “Gorillas in the Mist,” “Class Action,” “Nell,” “Extreme Measures,” the James Bond film “The World Is Not Enough,” and of course, the documentary series “Up.” 

“Amazing Grace” is based on the true story of William Wilberforce (1759-1833), a passionate anti-slavery campaigner who fights to get Parliament to outlaw the British transatlantic slave trade. It stars Welsh actor Ioan Gruffud as Wilberforce and Albert Finney as John Newton, the former slave ship captain-turned-clergyman who wrote the words to the now famous title hymn.

“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, not just because of popular opinion. It took a drawn-out political event to change things and that appealed to me. Not many people know how this was the first big step to abolish slavery. That period of English history between 1790 and 1830 was an incredibly rich period. It was a time when Britain avoided a civil war and observed from the sidelines as the French revolution was going on.”

One risk that Apted took was using largely unknown actors for the characters of Wilberforce, his wife Barbara Spooner 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 soulfulness and brooding look, but he could sing well, too.”

While “Amazing Grace” was successful in America, it didn’t do so well in the UK. “It was incredibly annoying,” said Apted. “Somebody in politics in London decided the film was racist because it didn’t deal with plantations and black brutality to black people. He said it was just another film about white people saving the black man. Some of the newspapers got hold of this and months before the film came out, they built up hostility toward it and we never recovered from it. 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 said that since the film‘s release, copies of its have been used in schools in many countries as a teaching tool to show people not just a slice of history but to emphasize that slavery still exists today in other forms, such as child labor in factories.

Having just finished “Narnia,” Apted said there couldn’t be two more different films between it and “Amazaing Grace.” For one thing, “Narnia” is in 3D. “We actually shot it 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 and seldom make much money at the box office, 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.“

Apted’s TV credits include “Coronation Street” in the 1960s, “ITV Playhouse” in the 1970s, and “Rome” in 2005. He has done many documentaries but is most famous for “Up,” a series that has followed the lives of 14 British children since they were 7. It started in 1964, and Apted has followed it up with a look at the 14 every seven years since.

“I’ll be shooting ‘56 Up’ this year to be broadcast in May of next year,” said Apted. “It has been a tremendous gift for me and the subject that people most want to talk to me about. I’ve been doing it for 49 years and it was almost an accident when it started.”