Asif Kapadia
Asif Kapadia
Asif Kapadiais a British filmmaker. He directed several award-winning films, including The Sheep Thief, winner of the 2nd Prize Cinéfondation for Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival, The Warrior, the BAFTA Award for Best British Film 2003 and Senna, winner of the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary, the BAFTA Award for Best Editing and the World Cinema Audience Award Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival 2011 and Amywhich has become the highest grossing documentary of all time in the...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionDirector
france great guys lives risking sports tour
The Tour de France would make a great movie. Drugs, corruption, political chicanery, guys risking their lives - everything you need for a great sports drama.
great love stories telling
I love telling stories with images. But I think there's more to just saying a movie is great visually.
anyone great tv
There's this great TV show we have called 'Later... with Jools Holland', a live-music show on Friday nights. Anyone and everyone's been on it.
great
It's always great to be able to go to a premiere with the actors there.
appeal dramas dreams formula great human sports
I wanted to make a film that wouldn't just appeal to Formula One fans. That's what the great sports documentaries do - 'Hoop Dreams,' 'When We Were Kings' - they're human dramas first, sport second, if at all.
sports
I was a sports fan long before I had any interest in film-making.
architect design graphic interested quite studied technical visual
I studied graphic design originally. I used to like drawing, and I was quite into technical drawing. I was always interested in the visual medium, but I thought I was going to be an architect or something like that, but it's quite a lonely job.
born far found life liked lived time weirdly
Weirdly enough, I live in London - was born there and have lived there all my life - but I hadn't made a film in London for a long time. I hadn't found the right subject. I liked going away, to some far flung place.
asked final given honorary martin meet mentioned scorsese tutors
Martin Scorsese was being given an honorary doctorate, and one of the tutors asked if there was a student film he particularly liked. He mentioned our film. There was a dinner after the final show just for the tutors, but I was smuggled in to meet Scorsese over dessert.
anyone car circles drove fan formula giant looked
Why make a movie about Ayrton Senna? Someone who drove around in circles at 200mph in a car that looked like a giant cigarette packet? Why would anyone who isn't already a fan of Formula 1 care?
class golden lucky martin master scorsese student ticket
While still a young student at film school, I was lucky enough to get a golden ticket to a Martin Scorsese master class at BAFTA in Piccadilly: fancy, but technically still 'the flicks'.
fully time
We were working on 'Senna' for a long time before we were fully financed, so we didn't actually have an editor for a while.
equipment films people
We were studying at Newport Film School, and I found that the only way for me to make films - because you need people and you need equipment - was that I had to be a student.
means
To be teammates in Formula One actually means you are first rivals, not really mates.