Attention political junkies, history buffs, religious seekers and Anglophiles: Suppose there was a spiritual leader of seminal importance on the scale of Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, and you’d never heard of him?
For many Americans, the period drama “Amazing Grace” will be their first exposure to English Member of Parliament William Wilberforce (1759-1833).
Wilberforce was a devout Christian abolitionist who not only helped spearhead the anti-slave trade movement in the Western world over 75 years before our Civil War but — along with his generational peer, British history’s youngest prime minister William Pitt (1759-1806), and a cadre of progressive champions inside and out of government — also set off a century of morality-based human rights advancements in health care, child labor, education and even animal rights that ushered in modern society as we know it.
“What I’m hearing from people is, ‘My God! We never knew this story,’ ” British director Michael Apted said during a recent visit to Washington to promote the film and meet with U.S. lawmakers in his capacity as president of the Directors Guild of America.
“They are talking about how fun it is to see something they don’t know anything about. To an American audience, there’s something inspiring about seeing a completely fresh story,” he says.
“Your fight in this country with the slave trade was fought in a much more dramatic arena. Whereas in England, as this film honors, it was fought in the corridors of power and also as part of a much wider reform movement which Wilberforce and these guys started,” says Apted, who also directed acclaimed films on real-life figures Loretta Lynn in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and primate advocate Dian Fossey in “Gorillas in the Mist.”
This week’s production (a project of Walden Media, in which The Examiner’s corporate parent holds a major interest) stars “The Fantastic Four’s” Ioan Gruffudd as Wilberforce, alongside thespian greats Albert Finney, Michael Gambon, Rufus Sewell and Ciaran Hinds.
“I wanted to make a film about the power of politics,” he says about his latest project, which traces the 20-year struggle to use procedural maneuvering and then-unprecedented activist pressure tactics to change hearts and laws in an economic system dependent on slave labor.
“What interested me about Wilberforce was that he had strong religious principles but he never allowed that to marginalize him out of the political world. His religion gave him strength to do the job, but he didn’t let it dominate his politics. He was as capable of doing a dirty trick as anybody.”
In one scene, the Wilberforce faction gives the opposition free tickets to the horse races to lure them away from Parliament for a crucial vote. “He also made all sorts of unholy alliances,” Apted notes. “There’s an interesting balance which I find intriguing between his spirituality and his pragmatism which I hope will resonate with people today.”
Because of time constraints and the dictates of drama, factual history had to be slightly altered.
“I didn’t want to do it as a straight biopic, which is how it came to me. I wanted to play with time jumps and put the crucial political event right in the middle of the film and then cherry-pick my way through the background,” the filmmaker explains. “You do have to make huge compressions, remove and combine characters, and invent incidents. As long as you honor the spirit of it and the characters in it, that’s all you can hope to do.”
And what rousing characters Michael Apted had on his hands to honor.
“Who knows what history 200 years from now will say about King, Mandela or Gandhi. But Wilberforce did do a lot. He and his people started a social revolution between 1790 and 1830 that changed England forever.”
‘Amazing’ Facts
» The world famous Christian hymn “Amazing Grace” has been interpreted and recorded by numerous musicians over the years on more than 1,100 albums, including a chart-topping version by Judy Collins in the 1970s. Aretha Franklin, Arlo Guthrie, Joan Baez, Billy Ray Cyrus, Bryan Ferry, Christina Aguilera, Dolly Parton, Elvis Presley, Mahalia Jackson, Ray Charles and Rod Stewart are among the varied artists to have covered it.
» Albert Finney plays the real-life lyrics writer in the movie named for the song. A mentor who inspired William Wilberforce to spearhead the anti-slave trade movement, Finney’s character, Englishman John Newton (1725-1807), experienced a life-transforming religious epiphany after many years as a slave ship captain responsible for the Middle Passage torture and death of thousands of Africans.
» Newton penned the words to “Amazing Grace” — loosely based around the biblical text of Ephesians 2:4-8 — sometime in the 1760s or early 1770s, according to conflicting reports. He would eventually help compose some 200 hymns for the church after his transformation into an evangelical pastor.
» Ironically, the man who created the verse “I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see” eventually lost his sight. He died a blind believer exactly 200 years ago in 1807, the same year that the Abolish Slave Trade bill passed after a two-decade struggle.
» A 2002 book by Steve Turner,”Amazing Grace: The Story of America’s Most Beloved Song,” traces its illustrious history.
