Science & Tech Quote by Michael Apted

Apted is drawing a line between movies that treat cinema like a lab instrument and movies that treat it like a lived space. His phrase "behaviorist films" is slyly clinical: it conjures observational, data-gathering work where the medium’s job is to capture behavior cleanly, cheaply, continuously. For that kind of project, the "change of technology" (lighter cameras, longer recording times, cheaper storage) is liberation. It lets the filmmaker be present without turning the act of filming into an event.

Then he pivots to "my kind of films", and the argument becomes less about efficiency than about aesthetics and ethics. "Doing them on film is much better" isn’t nostalgia for an old workflow; it’s a claim about attention. Film stock imposes cost, scarcity, and delay. You can’t roll forever. You plan, you choose, you commit. That constraint shapes performances and decisions on set, and it shapes what a director values: not just capturing reality, but composing it.

The loaded word is "beautiful". Apted isn’t only praising grain and color response; he’s defending cinema as an art of texture, depth, and human presence - the sense that light has weight. In the late-20th/early-21st century shift from celluloid to digital, "beautiful" becomes a cultural protest against a broader logic of upgrade culture: smoother, faster, more convenient, but often flatter. Apted’s subtext is that some stories deserve a medium that doesn’t merely record life; it interprets it with reverence.