From a charismatic Formula 1 racing legend to a brilliant but flawed soccer god to a troubled, tragic singer, Academy Award-winning docmaker Asif Kapadia has made a career out of telling the stories of larger-than-life figures. But when it comes to his “dream job,” it was a group of “ordinary people” in their seventies who stole his heart.
Speaking at Rome’s MIA Market on Thursday, Kapadia opened up about what it was like to be handed the reins of the ground-breaking “Up” documentary series, which followed the lives of 14 everyday Brits over the course of more than six decades. The final, two-part installment aired last month in the U.K. on ITV.
“In the U.K., this is one of the most important television shows made. There’s nothing [like it],” Kapadia said. “It deals with humanity and life. Real people. Ordinary people.”
The “Up” series of films launched in 1964 with “7 Up,” capturing the lives of 10 boys and four girls in England all aged seven at the time. Cameras then revisited the group every seven years to chart their journey from childhood to teenagers, to adulthood, through careers, marriage, divorce, parenting, bereavement and more.
The longest-running documentary series ever made, it’s been broadcast in 157 countries, including the U.S., Canada, Japan, China, Australia and France.
All but the first in the series were directed by Michael Apted, who passed away in 2021. Kapadia was handed the baton to direct the final installment, saying he “felt very honored and privileged to have a chance to be a part of it.”
“It was like finishing off something someone had started — just closing the circle,” he said. “It’s a dream job.”
The acclaimed director of “Senna,” “Diego Maradona” and “Amy” — an intimate portrait of the late singer Amy Winehouse that won the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2016 — Kapadia was appearing in conversation with MIA’s head of doc content Marco Spagnoli, who said that when Apted attended the Rome market in 2018, he described the “Up” series as “his life-defining project.”
Sharing the story of how he found himself at the helm of the final chapter, Kapadia described how he grew up watching the iconic series in his North London home, huddled around the TV set with his parents and siblings. Fast forward more than four decades and “someone knocks on the door of my office and says, ‘Are you Asif?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Did you make “Senna”?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Would you be interested in making the “7 Up” film?’”
The director grinned. “I was very busy working on other things, but there was no way I could say no,” he said. “It’s like a dream.”
Best known for his ambitious documentary features, Kapadia described the process of adapting to the rigors of television production. “It was essentially a TV budget, which was not a lot of time, not a lot of money. It was very small,” he said. “We had to do it fast. But what I decided to do — because I can’t help myself — is to go back to the dailies, and to see things that have never been seen that had been filmed previously.”
In the end, the director wound up incorporating footage of “14 characters who have been filmed for 63 years,” along with Apted himself, whose work on the “Up” series began with the second installment. “I made him a character as well, because I’m kind of looking at the nature of filmmaking and documentary, which the series in a way created that,” Kapadia said.
“I’ve got 15 characters over 60 years. It’s a lot of material, so that was the real challenge. But I’m really quite proud of it,” he said. “It’s quite amazing and profound and beautiful, because of how it somehow covers life. It’s all there somewhere.”
The 12th edition of Rome’s MIA Market runs Oct. 19 – 23.