Asif Kapadia

BAFTA and Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker, Asif Kapadia has crafted an interesting niche for himself. He’s gained an admirable momentum for producing a trilogy of biopics on people the world has grown to love and admire — Ayrton Senna, Amy Winehouse and Diego Maradona. Archival footage forms the backbone of his directorial language. Ingeniously, he pieces together footage shot at varying points of time, to mould a narrative that is truthful and visceral. Kapadia’s ground-breaking style has brought him much acclaim, celebrating him as one of the most gifted documentarians. 
 
Excerpts from our conversation with Asif Kapadia about his highly acclaimed films, Amy and Diego Maradona.
 
On Amy:
 
Before you decided to make a biopic on Amy Winehouse, did you know her personally? 
Oh, I hadn’t never met her. When I started making the film, I knew her songs, I knew her voice, I had the records, but I didn’t know her. I normally make films about subjects I don’t really know too much about. I learn on the journey. Now, of course, I know a lot about her—I’ve seen so many of her incredible performances. What is interesting about her is that it’s not just the voice, it’s her writing. For me, the hardest thing ever is to do is write something that is original, emotional, personal, which has depth and humour. You will be surprised to know how funny and intelligent Amy is. When you meet her as a young person [in the film], she is so different to the person who becomes famous. I think that was a big part of her journey. The more I sat down and watched her [footage], the more I learned about her and felt it was a story that needed to be told. People have such a skewed idea of who she was and there is so much more to her than just the voice.
 
How did you immerse yourself in her highly glamorised world? Where did you begin?
I just started talking to people. I interviewed people: we would just sit down and have a chat; there was no agenda. I had a lot of questions, but I never got around to asking them. I would just let them talk, and through talking, one thing would lead to another. Most of the people I spoke to had been carrying a lot of pressure and pain inside of them and nobody had ever spoken to them. Since I was not a part of her story and because I was not connected to her life or was in the music business, they felt free to tell me what they really felt. It became almost like this therapeutic process for them. I interviewed over a 100 people. During those interviews, they would tell me, “Look, I have this video, I have this photograph, I have these phone messages”—and they’d share their memories [with me]. So, the film is not only their interviews, but also the memories they have of Amy. They shared material that they held very close to themselves, and they trusted me enough to give me that material to put in the film. So, the film is a construction of the material that I discovered as I was going around talking to people. In a way, this is a film within a film.
 
 

During these interviews, what was the first most striking bit about her that hit you?
I think it was the humour. When she was young, she looked so healthy—she had such wit, and her eyes were amazing and beautiful and bright. She’s very different to the person who eventually became famous. Of course, when she’s young, you can see all of her issues already being there, but they really begin to surface when money, fame and the wrong people enter her life. It all kind of explodes. She began doing a lot of things to keep herself medicated in order to numb the pain that she was in. There were a lot of things that happened around her and at that time, she just wanted to shut herself off from the world. It felt like she became a bit of a recluse. So, it’s a complicated story and journey. But really, it was her humour that was a big revelation, and her incredible ability as a writer.
 
Could you talk a bit about who Amy was as a person?
I would say that you just need to read her songs’ lyrics. The clue is already there—she’s talked about it all. It’s very hard to explain, because there are so many elements to her. So, there is no one obvious answer. It’s her real life which is much more complex—family, friends, boyfriends, husbands, depression, drink, drugs, falling in love, being dumped by the one you love—so many things happened to her that created insecurities within her, that manifested themselves in many ways. Then she became famous and was surrounded by people, and she wondered, "Are they here because they like me or because I’m rich and famous?" And if you’re not sure of yourself, if you are not confident, then you don’t know whom to trust. 
 
Amy had a complex relationship with cameras: the cameras constantly followed her, the cameras brought her fame and it was this fame that eventually dictated her downfall. Now, it is the footage from these cameras that tell the world her story.
Yeah, I mean the cameras are a big part of the story. When you see the film, you’ll realize that it starts off with the camera being friendly towards her—the videos are basically footage shot by her friends, her first manager, her boyfriend—you know, people who she knows and loves. However, slowly as you go along, her relationship with the camera becomes darker, and in a way, more violent. You can see her becoming more and more afraid of the camera, because rather than friendly people filming her (and her filming herself a lot as well), there are people who are filming her to sell the footage. So, it becomes paparazzi—you see people using the camera to humiliate her. In a way, the camera, rather than being a friendly tool which helps you take a photograph and make a memory, becomes the very means of attacking her, and that’s very much a part of the movie experience. 
 
The irony about biopics is that most of us already know the story. More importantly, we know how it’s going to end. In the case of your film ‘Amy’, we already know that the narrative has a sad ending. Was that a cause of worry? 
Well, that’s where the film-making comes in. Of course, you already know the ending, but you don’t know why that ending happened. It is the beginning that is really important. You know that her story ends a certain way, but my questions always are, ‘Why did it happen? How did it happen?’ And that’s why I made the film, because it made no sense to me as to why someone would die that young? How was it possible? Why didn’t anyone do anything to stop it? So, the film is really going backwards from that point. You already know the ending, but the film tries to make you understand what happened in between for her to reach that point. Amy’s life was very complicated—she was incredibly intelligent and complicated—so the film became my way of giving you enough of the back story to understand how things transpired. 
 

On Diego Maradona:
 
What led you towards Maradona as your subject for this film?
Mainly because I am a football fan and for my generation he was the best player. Well that’s not enough to make a film but with Maradona, it is the kind of drama and controversy that his life has seen which makes him a really interesting character. Not a lot of people reach the kind of heights that he did and are yet so complicated and divide the audiences the way he did. 
 
During the making of this film, how was your experience with interviewing Maradona like and what kind of a relationship do you share with him now?
I met him four or five times. Some days they were good days and some days, not so good. Some days he wasn’t feeling well and some days he would be very chatty so the experience was kind of an average in all. My feeling of him was that he was a very charming and nice guy, and he once spoke to me for nine to ten hours. I mean no one really gives you so much time and access to themselves. Yet he was not a very easy person in terms of making him look backwards or make him admit that he had mad mistakes or done wrong things in his past. So it was really a hard job to kind of dig in to certain key moments of his life but I feel like we got there. In terms of contacting him, really it was always through someone else. Its not like I have his number on my mobile or anything. There was this brief period of time when he was in Dubai and we spoke to the people around him who gave us access to him but he left Dubai we lost all contact with him. The people around him changed and he began to travel all over the world. The last I spoke to him was around the World Cup last year when I was about to go to Moscow to show him the film but I decided against it because the World Cup is a crazy time and it did not seem right to show him the film then. I was in Argentina two weeks ago where I was hoping to meet him and show him the film but it didn’t happen. So as far as I know, he hasn’t seen the film yet and everyone, including you and I will only know about it after he puts it on his Instagram!
 
Could you take us a little further into the making of this film and your creative process behind it?
I have a big team of people who do all the research. Now coming from England somehow everyone assumes this one given version of the story but for us it was important to really dig deeper. For Maradona, everyone key in his life speaks in Spanish and our story itself essentially takes place in Italy, when he was playing in Naples. So it was essential that we spoke and understood Italian and Spanish. You have to talk to the people and their stories in their words, in their language. 

So it took us three long years to make this film. The first year was just research which was happening while I was working on Mindhunter with David Fincher. After I came back my team had drawn extensive lists of key people and their whereabouts and who to speak to and why. Then I began interviewing people and I met about 80 people. Some of the people are in the film, some of them just have two lines and some of them are not in the film at all and gave me just bits of information. So we have the research, the footage that we collected, the interviews and then the edit. Now all of these happen simultaneously and affect one another, Like something in the footage would change the interviews and some thing in the dit would change how we use the footage. So everything came together in a very organic way, very different from the making of a fiction film which has a very linear and definite process. This is one of the things I love about documentary filmmaking, the flexibility.
 

What do you think you were setting out to achieve when you started this project?
I knew he was famous and football is the biggest sport in the world. Generally people think they know everything about Maradona and my hope is, with every film I make, to say something new about the characters people thing they already know everything about. It was the same with Amy where people thought they knew her and the fact that she had problems and et cetera and then you watch the film and you realise that maybe you did not know much about her at all. Same with Maradona and what is interesting is that his story is somehow really moving because you’ll see that Maradona does not always do things that are very likeable and he is quite a tough character to love. But I was hoping that people will come to sympathise with him and people like him, considering the kind of life he lived and everything that he has achieved, not a lot of people can go through a life like his and survive. 

What was the most challenging part about this project?
Press. Not you and I am kidding. No each film was really different in this way. With Senna, I was kind of creating a style of filmmaking that was not very well know at that time. With Amy, it was very emotionally draining and very raw because she had only just died so nobody wanted to talk about it and nobody wanted to trust the journalists, the filmmakers. So that film was almost like a therapist for all these people. Maradona was difficult because he is not easy to get close to. And then, I live in London, the film is set it Italy, Diego lives in Dubai, and all of the people who know him the best, live in Argentina. So, I don’t speak Spanish, I don’t speak Italian. It was a really hard and complicated, a world travelling film really to create a story of a guy who is not very easy t get close to in the first place. 

Text Radhika Iyengar and Nidhi Verma