Faith & Spirit Quote by Michael Apted

Apted is quietly confessing the director’s dirty secret: in most commercial filmmaking, authorship is leased, not owned. When he says documentaries have "more sense of creating something", he’s not praising the genre’s purity so much as naming an economy of control. In narrative features, the director is often a high-level interpreter hired to deliver someone else’s blueprint on time and on budget. "Because I don't write the movies I do" lands like a shrug and a bruise. It’s practical, but it’s also a small indictment of an industry that sells the myth of the director as singular visionary while structurally separating vision from the page.

The line about "my own soul" risks sounding sentimental, yet it’s doing something sharper: staking out a moral territory. Documentaries, in Apted’s framing, aren’t just more personal; they’re more accountable. When your raw material is real people and lived time, you can’t hide behind genre conventions or studio notes. You are choosing what to witness, what to frame, what to return to. That’s especially charged coming from Apted, whose career bridged both modes and whose Up series turned time itself into narrative, built on patience rather than plot.

Subtextually, he’s describing documentary as a place where craft becomes identity: the work doesn’t merely reflect competence, it reflects consequence. Movies can be dazzling products. Documentaries, for him, are evidence of a self at work - not perfectly pure, but unmistakably present.