ASIF KAPADIA INTERVIEW PRODUCTION
SENNA, AMY AND DIEGO MARADONA DIRECTOR, ASIF KAPADIA, WAS AWARDED THE BBC GRIERSON TRUSTEES’ AWARD THIS MONTH. TIM DAMS FINDS OUT WHAT’S NEXT
B
FILMOGRAPHY THE SHEEP THIEF (1997) Second Prize in the Cinefondation section of the 1998 Cannes International Film Festival. THE WARRIOR (2001) Nominated for three BAFTAs, winning two for Outstanding British Film of the Year and The Carl Foreman Award for Special Achievement by a Director in their First Feature. FAR NORTH (2007) Premiered at the Venice Film Festival. SENNA (2011) Won Best Documentary and Best Editing Baftas, as well as being nominated for Best British Film. Also a winner at Sundance, London Critics Circle, BIFA, Los Angeles Film Festival AMY (2015) The highest grossing UK documentary of all time, overtaking Senna. Academy Award for Feature Documentary, BAFTA for Best Documentary as well as being nominated for Outstanding British Film. DIEGO MARADONA (2019) Nominated for Bafta Best Documentary. Also multiple nominee at Cannes, BIFA and Critics Choice
orn in 1972 in Hackney, London, Asif Kapadia studied filmmaking at the Royal College of Art where he first gained
recognition with his short film, The Sheep Thief (1997). His debut film The Warrior won best British film and best debut film at the BAFTAs. But it is his documentaries for which Kapadia
is best known. His acclaimed trilogy Senna, Amy, and Diego Maradona focus on the rise and fall of child geniuses and the price of fame. Amy won the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2016. “His films aren’t just a hit with reviewers,
but audiences too - making him Britain’s biggest box-office-breaking documentarian,” says Lorraine Heggessey, chairman of The Grierson Trust, which honoured him with its prestigious BBC Grierson Trustees’ Award at the 2020 British Documentary Awards. Kapadia is currently directing and executive
producing an Apple TV documentary series with executive producers Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry focusing on mental health and well-being. And he recently announced a move into XR filmmaking, creating a short film about Laika, the Russian space dog.
based, but I wanted them to feel like they were fiction films. I wanted them to play like drama. Even now I meet people who look at the
films and they go, ‘So when did you shoot that?” They think I was following Diego, Ayrton Senna or Amy. My technique was that I wanted myself as a director to be invisible. If I’m making a fiction film, I don’t want the audience every few minutes to think, ‘Oh, look, who has made the film, he’s in it, you can hear his voice.’”
“I DIDN’T GROW UP WANTING TO MAKE DOCUMENTARIES. FOR ME, THEY ARE FILMS”
ON HIS DOCUMENTARY TECHNIQUE “I’m grateful and excited [for the BBC Grierson Trustees’ Award] because there is always this feeling that you’re a bit of an outsider, you’re sort of visiting a genre. I didn’t grow up wanting to make documentaries. For me, they are films. I always wanted to make films that would affect and emotionally engage an audience. I never wanted my documentary work to
be somehow second grade. I use the same crew on my fiction films as I would on my documentaries. I put as much effort into both. The sound, the music, the editing - everything technically has to be as good as it can. Sometimes it’s healthy for an outsider to
come into an industry and to shake it up a little bit. When I made Senna, I’d never really made a documentary. I had an idea of how I felt we could do the film, and a lot of very seasoned filmmakers in the genre said ‘that’s not a doc. All you’re doing is editing someone else’s footage’. Senna, Amy and Diego Maradona were a trilogy
of films of a certain style. They weren’t conventional docs. They didn’t have interviews. They were archive
WHAT HE IS UP TO NEXT “On the Corner [the indie Kapadia founded with James Gay-Rees] has got a music series, 1971, which is just completed. I like making short films in the middle of features or just pushing myself to do different things. So I am working on an XR film where I’m playing with a different genre - sci fi. I’m also working on an Apple series to do with mental health. And various other things – I’m on the Bafta film committee. I’m always doing a bit of teaching. And I’m always writing, just trying to figure out what the next project is going to be. I feel like whatever I do
next, I’ve got to push myself into a new space and see where cinema or documentary takes me next. I think that there’s a hybrid to be done,
somewhere in the space between fiction and documentary. That’s my instinct. I’ve been working on it, thinking about it for quite a while. It’s a bit too early to talk about right now.”
ON VIRTUAL REALITY “I started out as a cynic about VR. I wear glasses, I get migraines, I’ve got really bad stigmatism. I remember finding it all not particularly comfortable. Then I got asked to do a short film as a commission from the BFI London Film Festival and the NFTS which have an Immersive Storytelling Centre. I just like experimenting. I was asked to be on the jury at Venice this year, for the VR section. I saw some amazing work. And that’s when I realised, okay, this is really the next step of how to push the entertainment industry and the business to another level. I’m a convert now. It’s not cinema, it’s not TV, or watching stuff on your phone. It is another way of expanding the medium. There are certain films, if done right, that work perfectly in that form. And they could not be done in any other way.”
Winter 2020
televisual.com 19
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133
