Michael Apted

“It was one of those great miracles of history that they managed to smuggle an Enigma machines out to Britain just before they were invaded by the Nazis.”

“I've never much been interested in doing films that no one gets to see.”

“For behaviorist films, that's been much more useful - the change of technology - but for my kind of films, doing them on film is much better, because it's more beautiful.”

“He wasn't, but producers are by definition annoying because they have a different agenda from you. They're trying to stop you spending money and you're trying to not spend money, but at the same time we're great artists.”

“So I do tend to do documentaries where I can move in and out of them.”

“It's still the same job, the same anxieties, but it did feel a lot different, that kind of budget, that schedule, and frankly, the slowness of it all, and also having a lot of other units working.”

“It takes great skill to tell a compelling story in under 60 seconds. These five directors have mastered the format, using their talent, craft and imagination to provide us with some of the most innovative filmmaking out there today.”

“One of the reasons to do documentaries is that. There's more sense of creating something, more sense of my own soul in the documentaries than in movies, because I don't write the movies I do.”

“Your great country is wonderful at stealing pieces of history and using it for its own purposes, so there didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about it but the English were incredibly exercised about it.”

“Anyway, that was the germ of the idea and of course... you know this was early days of sociology and whatever, especially on television.”

“Now that I can edit the whole thing on AVID and edit the whole thing on tape, maybe I will do the next digitally, because maybe the quality will become less obvious between tape and film.”

“When I joined Granada - which, you don't want to start crying about these things, but Granada was a very, very hot place to be, it was my good fortune to be there at that time - the BBC was firmly asleep.”

“Music video directors, who conceive, write and direct these works, enjoy no creative rights, receive no ongoing financial benefit from the sale of our work, and many times are not even credited.”