FILM / Hollywood, with reservations: Leo Burley talks to the British director of the documentary turned feature film Thunderheart

As European adventurers in America go, Michael Apted has fared better than most. Born in Ilford, Essex, he set sail for the New World in 1980, and - with films like Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorky Park, Gorillas in the Mist and Class Action - has since earned a reputation as a film director with a fair amount of integrity (which is more than can be said for the recent spate of Columbus movies). Apted's latest offering, Thunderheart, opens here today and provides a timely reminder of the real legacy of the white man in America.

The film was inspired by events on Sioux reservations in South Dakota's Badlands during the 1970s. Apted, whose reputation as a skilled documentary- maker preceded him to Hollywood, was originally approached by Robert Redford, who wanted to produce and narrate a factual account of the subject, having despaired of finding a decent script for a dramatised film.

After researching the project himself, Apted agreed. The resulting documentary, Incident at Oglala (which received its British premiere at this year's Edinburgh Film Festival), persuaded another icon- turned-producer, Robert De Niro, that the story deserved Tinseltown's full feature treatment. He asked Apted to direct.

'It was very odd,' recalled the 51-year- old director, in London for the UK premiere of Thunderheart. 'I was doing these two films with 'Ordinary Bob' and 'Raging Bob' as I call them. I only met Redford once in the whole process and De Niro never showed up at all, though he was on the phone every now and then. But I can't speak highly enough of both guys. I doubt if either film would have been made without them.'

Thunderheart, beneath its glossy, action-packed exterior, is a quietly seditious film. It alleges, albeit through a fictitious plot, that the US government was responsible for the covert repression and murder of American Indian activists during the 1970s, using the FBI to enforce the unwritten law of the land - that might makes rights, and native Americans lost both long ago.

Leonard Peltier, one of the activists featured in Incident at Oglala, is still serving two consecutive life sentences for the murder of two FBI agents in 1975, a conviction which prompted Amnesty International to accord Peltier political prisoner status, the only such case in the United States. That both Redford and De Niro should have chosen Apted to interpret such a sensitive blot on the American moral landscape underlines the British director's reputation as one of Hollywood's few truth-seekers.

'I was always irritated by the residue of Dances With Wolves, as though the Indian wars had ended with old Costner riding off into the snow-set. Yet you can't open a copy of the New York Times without seeing something about the misuse of Indian land, be it water rights or mining rights or whatever - it's all still going on,' said Apted. 'I felt pretty bad for not knowing more myself, but I'm English. I was here in the 1970s, I wasn't there.'

Apted's career has been divided neatly by decades. In the 1960s he was based in Manchester, working as a researcher and programme-maker for Granada, part of the original team that made that seminal study of British class divisions, 7-up. Apted himself leapfrogged his social barriers by winning a scholarship to the City of London School for Boys before graduating from Cambridge. His later wanderings have been punctuated by seven-yearly returns to the 7-up project, most recently to direct 35-up in 1989.

In the 1970s, as Peltier and other members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) fought pitched battles with the authorities on the Pine Ridge reservation, Apted worked as a freelance film director in London on films like Stardust and Agatha.

His first American film, Coal Miner's Daughter, won Sissy Spacek the 1980 Oscar for Best Actress and set Apted's course as a maker of social conscience features which, in his own words, 'don't cost much to make but aren't that easy to sell either'.

Thunderheart represents a coming together of Apted's dual careers; soft- centred liberal thriller meets hard-core documentary. The opening scenes of the film are cut together with 1970s newsreel footage of the reservation, which is more reminiscent of Soweto than Middle America. 'One of the main points of the film is the counterpoint between the magnificent landscape and the dereliction of the human spirit within it,' explained Apted.

Much of Thunderheart's violence is taken directly from the killings documented in Redford's film, though the plot itself bears little or no relation to actual events. Val Kilmer stars as FBI agent Levoi, appointed to investigate the murder of Leo Fast Elk ('not fast enough,' quips one of the FBI agents), an American Indian activist. In reality over 60 such murders took place on South Dakota reservations between 1972 and 1976, none of which was solved or properly investigated until the deaths of the two FBI agents.

The casting of Kilmer, who looks about as native as General Custer (despite claiming 'quarter-Indian ancestry'), was viewed by some as an attempt to sidestep the accusation of racism. 'I've taken some heat, though mostly from left-wing whites,' admitted Apted. 'Most Indians seem to like the movie. The reality is that without a white lead, no one would have made the film.'

Thunderheart's success among native Americans probably owes much to Apted's decision to merge his cast of actors with real veterans of the Incident at Oglala. John Trudell, who plays the fugitive warrior Jimmy Looks Twice, is an AIM member who lost his wife and three children in an unexplained house-fire during the 1970s 'reign of terror' on the Pine Ridge reservation.

Since Incident at Oglala has yet to gain general release in the UK, these finer documentary themes and Apted's skilful handling of first-time actors will be lost in the wham-bam style of Thunderheart. The director, though, is keen to stress that the film was never intended as a factual account:

'A documentary can only go so far; it's a marshalling of facts. In the movie I was looking for something else: I wanted it to be entertaining, political, spiritual . . . all those elements it's much tougher to deal with in documentary.' As Apted was swift to point out, the coldest fact about documentaries is that comparatively few people see them. It was this that led him towards features and ultimately Hollywood in the first place.

'Even in my early days at Granada, I always wanted to do mainstream movies which could be commercially distributed. I never wanted to stay here and make low- budget independent films,' said Apted. Yet in many ways his yearning for a big box-office hit has been compromised by his reputation as a 'serious' film- maker, a tag that fellow expatriates, such as Ridley Scott and Alan Parker, who cut their teeth in advertising, have managed to avoid.

'I don't move very easily in Hollywood,' explained Apted, with regret. 'I lack the social grace needed to operate at that level. It's not my style. I tend to be driven more by a passion for good material rather than the social circuit, so I don't play the town very well. I wish I did, I think I would have been more successful. Ideally, I'd like to be at the commercial centre of Hollywood, directing a Costner or a Schwarzenegger but I won't do a script that I think is a heap of shit just to work with a movie star.'

'Thunderheart' is released today

For review, see opposite

(Photograph omitted)