Asif Kapadia Quotes
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A lot of the time when I'm working, I'm abroad.
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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.
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I never know going in if I've even got a movie to make. Once you start making a film, you hope there's going to be enough material! My job as a director is always to push for more.
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In a film called 'Senna,' the clue is in the title, and we have a Brazilian badge on our sleeve as we were making it. We were making it from Senna's point of view, with Senna narrating it.
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Hopefully with digital projection, a film will always look the way the filmmaker intended.
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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.
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My background is from India, and I always get asked, 'When are you going to do an Indian film, a musical or Bollywood film?'
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I made several short films with very little dialogue. I'm still not a fan of talking heads. My stories are told with images as much as possible.
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I made three short films of my own which I wrote, produced, directed... you did everything in those days. My favourite one was something I shot on VHS... a little documentary.
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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.
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The big thing for me is to make films that you feel, whether you feel happy, whether you feel sad, whether you feel sick; it's to make the audience feel so that the next day they remember what they saw.
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My background is Indian, so I believe in a spiritual idea that there is another level, another layer or layers, if you will, above us. I believe that there are elements that allow things to be drawn together, a sort of energy.
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Real life is far more complicated than fiction.
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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.
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After Newport, I worked in television for a while, and then I went to The Royal College Of Art and did a master's degree. I really did study quite a lot!
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I wanted to study film at an art school - I loved the idea of being surrounded by designers and artists. We were encouraged to be experimental.
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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?
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Hopefully, when people see 'Senna', they will understand why this inspirational story needed to be told, why it had to be made as a movie for the big screen, and why it is a film for everyone.
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My films often have a spiritual dimension which comes from my Muslim background, and I'm happy to tackle that in cinema.
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I like to make films where I learn along the way, like the audience.
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I just loved films. I knew I wanted to work on film, not video.
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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.
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'Do the Right Thing' has been a big influence on me. I saw it when it first came out in 1989. I was about 18, and it blew me away on many levels - I had never seen anything like it before.
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'Senna' took five years, 'Amy' took three years. You try and say, 'Look, there's no deadline.' That's important. Just saying, 'We've got to make the film. And once the film's ready, it will be out there.'