His most famous works don’t have happy endings or ever-smiling faces but Asif Kapadia’s methods aren’t about those anyway. His work is about telling the story, the real and raw one with all of its darkness and ups and downs, he said.
Speaking at the 13th edition of the Dubai International Film Festival (Diff) on December 8, Kapadia spoke about why he loved making movies — his babies as he called them — about real people and their very real lives.
Senna, Kapadia’s documentary about renowned F1 driver Ayrton Senna, was the film that threw him and his unique talent into the limelight. It set the ball rolling and now after Amy, another huge hit with both audiences and critics, he is all set for his upcoming project, Maradona, on the famous football player.
Kapadia started work on Amy, about the late singer Amy Winehouse a year after she died, with interviews and preliminary work going on for over a year after that.
“It was still raw then, for her friends and her family and people who knew her, to talk”, Kapadia said.
But he managed to get through all of the human and technical barriers to find unseen footage which shows Winehouse in all her happiness, her struggles and how those who loved her played a part in how her life went down.
“This was the pre-iPhone era and most of the movie is from home-videos where Amy was with her friends and her family on different occasions”.
When asked about how the footage for Senna and Amy were different, he explained that while most the visuals for Senna had not just him but crowds cheering or cars on the circuit’ in Amy, she directly looks and interacts with the person behind the camera.
“You can see how comfortable she was with being in front of the camera, and then see how that changed into fear towards the later stages of her life”, he said.
Mitchell ‘Mitch’ Winehouse, Amy’s father, had tweeted his disagreements with the movie after its release. “Let me say one more time, this film is a lie. My words have been edited to give different meanings. I was not given right of reply,” he said.
Kapadia admitted that he would have to see how things go with Diego Maradona as he will be around to see the documentary.
“It does not make me afraid in any sense, but the challenge involved is why I would love to do the movie,” Kapadia said. “I believe he wouldn’t have sought me out for anything that wasn’t genuine or real. We still have a lot of work to do and we will see how it all turns out.”
