Anti-slavery crusader William Wilberforce’s home town of Hull was so thrilled when Hollywood dropped by to film scenes for Amazing Grace – a powerful political biopic of their humanitarian golden boy – the university invested the director, Michael Apted, with an honorary Doctorate of Letters. In turn, the die-hard West Ham devotee, equally chuffed with this courtesy bestowed upon him, now declares himself a “minor” supporter of Hull City.

Indeed, Mr Apted’s aptitude for language is particularly spirited on a bitingly cold morning in New York as he checks his laptop for news of the Hammers’ progress against Watford. The air in his Park Avenue hotel suite turns several shades darker than that of the cobalt-blue Manhattan skyline. “Oh, God! They’ve missed a f***ing penalty! They’re going to go down. Bollocks!”

Thankfully, there’s no time to phone his two grown-up sons in California, dissect the match and get even more depressed, because he’s due to meet Amazing Grace screenwriter Steven Knight, also in town for the American premiere of Apted’s film about this heightened and crucial period in late 18th and early 19th-century politics. And no, lunch won’t be a sullen affair. Knight, Oscar-nominated for Dirty Pretty Things four years ago, is a Birmingham City fan; he understands these histrionics. In between intense discussion about how the Wilberforce film should take shape, the pair had bonded over football. And there’s a bonus to add cheer to Apted’s day (his 66th birthday), because Benedict Cumberbatch – his William Pitt the Younger to Ioan Gruffudd’s Wilberforce – is also waiting downstairs with Knight in the hotel lobby.

Footie obsession aside – slightly at odds with his urbane and cultured other self – Apted is no grumpy old man. Pretty sane (normal, even) for someone who has lived 25-odd years in the self-absorbed vacuum that is Los Angeles. He compares the complexities of his job to that of a trial lawyer. “You have to be on your game constantly; basically you can’t have a bad day.”

BACKGROUND

• Amazing Grace

• Amazing Grace - smaller is better

• Abolition man

• Amazingly graceless remarks by dull critics

• Film row on ‘prettifying’ of slave trade

Keeping it real

Michael Apted’s new film about slavery has its critics. But what irks this craftsman most is calling his landmark Seven Up series reality TV

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And hissy fits would hardly benefit the increasingly delicate negotiations which surround visitation rights to his “baby” every seven years. He has nurtured Seven Up, one of television’s most seminal and enduring sociological documentaries, since its inception. On its next outing in 2012, it will be a very middle-aged 56. Neither would a tendency to sulk have given other Hollywood heavyweights confidence when they voted Apted in as President of the prestigious Directors Guild of America – the first non-American president.

Amazing Grace, which was made for a relatively moderate $28 million, financed by Walden Media – owned by committed Christian Philip Anschutz, whose other assets include David Beckham’s new club, Los Angeles Galaxy – was a relative breeze to make compared, say, to a Bond movie. The World Is Not Enough in Apted’s case. And yet, whatever the project, there are still varying creative agendas and egos to massage, including, of course, those of financiers.

“I reassured them I wasn’t trying to torpedo their interest in Wilberforce’s Christianity or minimise the religious importance but neither was I trying to make a happy-clappy movie and set him up as some saint-like figure,” explains Apted. “What intrigued me so much about his character – and what is so resonant today – is that here is a guy who is clearly deeply religious, but is able not to take the religious or moral high ground and simply use it as a political base, which is what is happening now. And why the world is such a dangerous place. To me, his stock is Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela… People who were able to be very effective politicians and still be religious.”

There are few black actors in Amazing Grace, and this has drawn criticism, not least from Ken Livingstone’s equalities adviser Lee Jasper, who claimed the film belittled the actions of slaves themselves to win the abolition of the trade.

Apted, who had a long-held desire to direct a movie with a political base, “wasn’t really interested in making a film about slavery as such. I didn’t want to do a film about whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, because to me that’s a no-brainer. But the political issues surrounding slavery are so complicated and polarising.”

The only black actor with a major role is Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, who takes the pivotal role of Olaudah Equiano, an African slave who bought his freedom and settled in London, writing a book – which became a bestseller – about his extraordinary life. “As soon as Youssou walked into the room in London at our first meeting, I knew this was my guy. He had that pure presence and brings a richness and dignity to his scenes.”

They met again last summer in Dakar where N’Dour lives – Apted was in the Senegalese capital, shooting part of his documentary The Power of the Game (his “love letter to football”), released in cinemas later this spring. Made while also overseeing the official 2006 World Cup DVD film, and meetings with Fifa about Goal! 3, which he’ll direct in LA this spring, it’s been a schizophrenic period in Apted’s astonishingly prolific and respected career.

The director says that he “finds it almost unbelievable that the 7-year-old Apted became what I am now, that I could organise 900 crew and direct a Bond film.” So timid was Apted as a child growing up in Ilford, his mother would sometimes walk him to primary school to stop the other children kicking his school cap around the playground. He won a scholarship to the City of London School; and aged 17, he had what can best be described as a teenage epiphany. “I used to go to the cinema, to stare at girls, probably,” he muses. “And then I saw Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and I thought, ‘Holy Christ! This is a genuine form of expression’ and from that moment I knew I wanted to make films.”

He cut his teeth on Coronation Street back in 1966. “Forget bloody movie stars! Violet Carson and Pat Phoenix [Ena Sharples and Elsie Tanner] were the biggest divas in Britain. It was an incredible baptism, fantastic training. Everything I ever learnt about actors I learnt from Coronation Street.”

And everything he learnt about the making of real reality television, he learnt from Seven Up. Despite an impressive catalogue of work (from Coal Miner’s Daughter and Gorillas in the Mist to Gorky Park, Bond and the ambitious HBO/BBC drama series Rome), the “Ups” have dominated Apted’s career.

The fact that it is now seen as a progenitor of modern reality TV offends every film-making bone in Apted’s body. Reality TV is, he says, “totally contrived. You put people in forced circumstances, see how they respond, and that is the cruelty or the fun of it. The whole idea of reality television in a sense is to distort reality. When I did 49 Up, it dominated discussions [with our subjects], because there was no such thing as formal reality TV when I did 42 Up. The participants had a load of questions: ‘Are we reality TV? Are we being exploited here? Are we just cheap-trashy primetime entertainment? Shouldn’t we be making a ton of money because all of those people on Big Brother make money?’ I was at great pains to try to express the differences between documentary and reality TV.

“I think the real power of the series is that we can all identify with it, and the reason it’s so popular and riveting is because it deals with something that is found in all of us, and that is getting old. I have a family but I am a workaholic. Jesus! I’ll be 70 in four years… How am I going to deal with it when all this goes away?”

His job at the Guild aside, Apted’s next project is another labour of love: Goal! 3. As luck would have it, its setting is the Los Angeles Galaxy football club. How serendipitous! And no, admits Apted, Beckham can’t act. “But he can be himself.” And he can talk football over lunch, too.

Amazing Grace is now on release

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