In our October issue, Discover reviewed the movie 49 Up, the latest in a series of documentary movies widely known as the 7 Up series. In 1964, fourteen seven-year-old children from the U.K. were asked questions about love, work, race, and their future for a television show. Every seven years since, Academy Award–winning director Michael Apted has caught up with these subjects on film. In a Web exclusive, Discover editors Susan Kruglinski and Jocelyn Selim interviewed Apted about these extraordinary films and their place in science. 
First of all, could you just briefly explain how you got involved with the project?
I had just started work at Granada Television as a researcher and I was assigned to the program World in Action. The episode that was being made first was this look at seven-year-old children. So I was assigned the research job on that. My job was to find the kids.
Could you talk a little bit about how you chose the children?
Their [the producers'] idea of the film was to prove that the English class system was still very much in place despite all the great cultural movements of the early sixties in music, fashion, art, playwriting, whatever. Which seemed to suggest that there had been a democratization in English society. This film wanted to prove that the class system was still very much in evidence. So it was a slight self-fulfilling prophecy to fill, but it meant that I had to choose people really from the extremes of the social spectrum. Very wealthy, privileged people from London and also people from the working class in the poorer areas of London. It was a very, very quick process. The schools would put me in touch with the teacher. I'd tell them I wanted to see their seven-year-olds and then I would go down to the school and interview the seven-year-olds and make the choice from that.
And what was it that you were looking for?
People who could present themselves, who wouldn't just disappear on camera, who wouldn't be intimidated or overwhelmed by it all—which was hard to predict. But at least a child who could articulate whatever he was articulating whether he was working class or upper class.
What do you think the answer is after all these films? Do you think the British class system is still very much in place?
Oh, much less so. This film is only a portrait of people who were born in 1956. Class is still in the back of the national brain, but it's loosened up in considerable amounts since then. So this doesn't present an accurate portrait of England now, but just an accurate portrait of a generation of people. And even then it's skewed because what I missed in all that was the middle classes, which in the end proved to be the most mobile and the most threatened and the most volatile of all of them. Of course, the film outgrew its political roots fairly quickly. The class thing, although it's always been the kind of underpinning of the film, became I think, less and less important.
Is this film series scientific or not?
It's never been scientific.
But many well-received studies may be seen as attempting to quantify things that possibly aren't quantifiable, using small pools of people. How does this series compare?
I think the data is very powerful. I don't know anything about psychology or sociology. I'm just a filmmaker who knows these people, cares about these people, and asks them the questions that come into my head. I mean I'm not being naïve or self-deprecating, but I did at one point think I better read up on psychology and sociology. I did it for about five minutes and thought, "This is ridiculous."
Susan Kruglinski interviewed physicist Nick Hitchon, who is firmly committed to being in 49 Up, but says it's also very painful.
Susan Kruglinski and Jocelyn Selim reviewed 49 Up itself.
