Michael Apted quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'd always wanted to do something about the Second World War, but I didn't want to do another combat film, whether it was air, land, or sea.

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.

I'd love to direct commercials on Caribbean beacheswith luscious women rubbing on suntan lotion, but all I get arethese documentary-type things.

I had wanted to make a film about World War II for some time, but I didn't really want to do something that was set in the trenches, so to speak.

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

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.

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