ASIF KAPADIA INTERVIEW

After making a handful of documentaries, in 2001 British filmmaker Asif Kapadia set out to make his first feature, The Warrior, shooting in Rajasthan and the Himalayas. With a small crew and a cast of mainly non-actors, Kapadia crafted a stunningly epic debut that was part Sergio Leone western, part spiritual quest. He followed it up recently with something of a companion piece, the equally epic Far North, which starred Sean Bean and was arduously filmed against the landscape of the Arctic Circle. His latest film Senna takes him back to his documentary roots, telling the story of Ayrton Senna, widely regarded as the greatest Formula One driver.

In past films, Kapadia has employed a highly cinematic style, using long takes with very little dialogue, most notably for The Warrior and Far North. Given the overt spirituality and existential brooding inherent in his style, it seems an odd fit to make the leap to a Formula One documentary but Kapadia says he was moved to accept the job because of the kind of man Ayrton Senna was: “Some people want to see the pure racing driver and his story works on that level, you’ve got the rivalry, the corruption and then you’ve got what he meant to Brazil – you could make a movie just about what he meant to Brazil. They were just coming out of a dictatorship and were in such a bad way…but Senna would be the one to make them feel proud. All these levels are why you can make a movie about him, he wasn’t just a great sportsman, he transcended the sport in so many ways”.

A enigmatic individual; Senna was headstrong and impulsive yet calculating and methodical, a devout Christian deeply involved in charitable causes, who spoke of the near spiritual ecstasy he’d experience while racing, once risked his life stopping his car mid-race and crossing the track to check on an crashed colleague yet would think nothing of risking his life and that of a fellow driver, in order to win a race. For Kapadia, Senna’s spiritual journey mirrors the themes he’s explored elsewhere in his films: “Senna has got a lot in common with The Warrior…for me there are so many similarities character-wise; in terms of a person who is an outsider, a good guy in a bad world, going on a journey, in The Warrior, it was the western genre, dealing with feudal India. Here, you’ve got a guy in the very contemporary, ultra-technological Formula One world but there are themes that I felt were very similar running through the two films…his spirituality was absolutely something that made me interested (in doing it).” Departing from the usual structure for a feature documentary, there are no ‘talking head’ interviews in the film, Kapadia tells the story only through archival footage using Senna’s own voice, mixed with voiceover narration from family and colleagues: “My feature films tend to have very little dialogue so the idea of making a typical documentary with talking heads is something I can’t do…we had so much footage, Senna lived his life on camera and tragically died on camera. Quite early on, I had an instinct that if you cut away from the real footage, the drama gets broken…what I wanted to show was the footage of the time, when the rivals hated one another because the conflict was real.” After some lengthy negotiations, Kapadia and his producers were allowed access to Formula One’s archives: “We were the first outsiders to ever go into the archive, no one gets in there, we were able to go back to every race and recut it from the dailies. I’m pretty sure we were some of the first people to go in there and actually look at the footage from that weekend (when Senna died). It was really Bernie Ecclestone who owns the archives, without him there’s no movie”. This wealth of archival material was key to the development of the film’s structure and style, there was an astonishing amount of footage to sift through: “we had a seven hour cut at one point… but we were budgeted for a 90 minute film so we had to cut it, we managed to get it to 100 minutes. There was 40 minutes of archives in the budget and the rest of the film was going to be talking heads but I just cut a film made entirely of archive, so for two years we struggled because we were way over budget but the proof was in the pudding, we convinced everyone involved that this was the way to make the film so we had to go back to Bernie Ecclestone and re-negotiate the archival footage…by the time we were cutting Senna’s crash, I could cut to aerial shots, on board cameras, wide shots, whatever I wanted – as a filmmaker, that technology is another layer of the narrative: were it not for Senna’s stardom, we couldn’t have made a film like this.”

JARROD WALKER