From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

It's The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell, coming to you from KCRW.com.

It's hard to think of another director who moves us adroitly from fiction film to documentary, from studio to independent, to television as my guest director, Michael Apted.

Of course, we know him from films such as Gorilla in the Mists and Thunderheart, one of my favorites, and the world is not enough.

But I think there's a real soulful curiosity in his documentary filmmaking.

Most notably, the films he's best known for

to start with a group of young Londoners when they were seven years old. Those films are called

seven up. Every seven years he's revisited them. He's now at 49 up. Michael, thanks for being here.

Pleasure. I do think, though, there's a real, I feel if there's more of you in these,

in these up films than anything else you've done, obviously, just because of the time commitment alone.

Yeah, I think there is. It was the first job I ever did. I mean, I was a lowly researcher on Seven Up, responsible for finding the children.

But then it became, you know, my great passion to keep it going. It started out just as a one-off. And then because

it was so successful, we decided to go back and revisit them. And then once we'd done seven plus

seven, we had a sense that we were onto something, that there was a big idea at work here.

And so, you know, I've kept it going, although I moved to Los Angeles to live around the time of 28 up.

I've still kept the thing going at a distance.

But go back to England and wherever the people are, you know, every seven years to do the stuff.

So it was always a range in create to be just a one-up series and never?

Yeah, it was always going just to be one film.

You know, just to have, it was a rather just to be one film. You know, just...

It was a rather cute way and powerful way, actually,

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