Interview with Senna movie creator Asif Kapadia

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Ayrton Senna wasn't just a great driver, he was one of those very rare sportsmen wasn't he?

Yeah, he was special.  I mean, at so many levels he was amazing.  He was a great driver; he did things in a car that other people just couldn't imagine doing.  But it's also the man; it's what he stood for away from the car that makes him particularly special.

This was something of a labour of love for you – seven years or so in the making – how important was it to get the support of his family and Formula 1 management to do it right?

Well, the Producer, James Gay-Rees, and the writer and Executive Producer, Manish Pandey, started the film off and they approached Working Title for the finance; they approached the family to get the permission, because many people have tried in the past and either they couldn't get it together because the finance didn't work or the family just didn't think they'd do justice to the story.  A lot of people wanted to make a film just about Imola.  And what was important was that Manish and James pitched the idea about making a film that celebrated Senna's life. People who didn't know anything about him would suddenly understand why there are so many people in the world that loved Senna.

Movie goers really get to know Ayrton in this film through people close to him, like McLaren team boss, Ron Dennis, and the F1 medical delegate, Professor Sid Watkins.

Absolutely.  The key thing for us was to pick the right people that were close to Senna and to hear them and to, well, to just to make sure we get our facts right.  We wanted to make sure we told the story, the definitive story of Ayrton Senna.

His rivalry with Alain Prost during that era was legendary; did it seem even more intense as you went through some of that unseen footage?

I think we all knew about the rivalry. But what was interesting for me was seeing the footage before the rivalry kicked off, seeing them being friendly with one another. I'd never seen that footage before, I'd never seen these two shots where they're laughing and joking as Senna joins McLaren. You just think, well, potentially they could have become friends later in life maybe if they'd had time to.

How long did it take you to sort through 5000 hours or so of footage?

I've been working on the film for about four or five years, but the actual editing was nearly three years.  Two and a half years full on of just being in an edit suite, because normally on a movie you'd be writing the script, raising the money, editing … shooting and then editing.  In this case, it was all happening at the same time, so we were editing through the archives, doing research into these, meeting people and working on the story line to make sure we were telling the right story, and then going back to edit.  So, it was a good two and a half years non-stop of editing.

What would you have liked to have asked Ayrton Senna if you had the chance?

That's a really tough question isn't it, because he's the one person I've always known I could not interview. I suppose it would be interesting to hear had he walked away from the race, had he survived, what was going on his mind in Imola when he was sitting at the track? What was it that was troubling him so much and why couldn't he, at that moment, just say, "I'm not going to race today." I would have loved to have been able to talk to him, if he had walked away and gone fishing, to find out what were these key things that were really troubling him then.

What did you learn about Ayrton Senna during this film that you didn't already know?

I knew about the driver, I knew about the three world championships, I knew he had a very special style, I knew he was mentally this tough guy on the track. I probably knew more of the negative elements about him, but what I didn't know was what he was like as a man away from the car. I didn't realise that he was the guy that was always fighting for safety. I didn't realise he was the guy that actually all the other drivers felt that he was the one that was backing them up more than most.  So it was his achievements as a man away from the car that were totally new to me.

Were you surprised to get access to the drivers' briefing footage given how damning it is?

I love it.  I mean it's amazing footage. That's when we realised we have the potential to do something here which could be, not only work as a really, really good film and work for people who are not racing fans, but also as a piece of film-making we had the potential to do something very original, which is, if you can find all of the stories already in existing footage, why do you need to interview anyone now? Why do we need any talking heads to explain what's going on when Senna himself is going to tell you or show you?  So, those drivers' meetings were just brilliant and some of my favourite scenes, like the one where he's … arguing with Balestre about the cones – I just love that sequence, you know. 

It's so funny as well – you don't expect a film about Formula 1 to be funny.  But audiences around the world who know nothing about F1 … still find it very, very funny because Jean-Marie Balestre is amazing, you know – to think this guy really existed. And … they're not performing for the cameras during that sequence.  The camera is there, but it's somebody that works for Formula 1 management.  It's not a journalist standing there, so people are not performing.  They're being themselves, and so you get this amazing access of people who are being themselves, but it's all captured.  And it's drama, it's character and it's humour.

The film appeals to enthusiasts and non-enthusiasts alike. How important was that?

It was something that was always important to me at the beginning of the process because the writer, Manish Pandey, is a big Formula 1 fan, so he really has the knowledge – he was going to write something … to absolutely get the facts right.  The challenge for me was, "Well, how do we make this emotional for people who can't stand sport?  How do we make it work for people who just think the most boring thing on earth is watching giant cigarette packets go round and round in circles at 200 miles an hour?" And, importantly, "How do we get under the character of Senna because most of the time he's got a helmet on, you can't see his eyes, he's covered in these multi-national logos?"  So, that was my worry going in.  And the more we looked at the footage, the more we started finding things like the drivers' briefings, the more we just let Senna speak, the more he spoke and narrated his own life story, the more accessible it became.

We would show the film in various stages, various cuts, to people internally, and it was, right from the beginning, young girls who had never seen a race in their life and their Dad had tried to make them watch Formula 1 and they normally they would be "This is so boring". But they all fell in love with him.  So, from very early on we knew, "Well, we've got something really interesting here." Even though at times the studios still thought "The audience is the Formula 1 fans, no one else is going to pay to see it," we were the ones saying, "Well, we think we've got something else here. 

We think there's a potential for it to cross over."  The only answer is to let people see the film and let word of mouth spread.  And it's really hard to promote a movie because people just think, "Well, it's about a racing driver, why do I care?"  But then when people start to see it and it starts to win prizes, like it won the documentary, World Cinema Documentary prize, audience award at Sundance.  It won the same prize, the audience award at Adelaide; it then won the audience prize at the Los Angeles Film Festival.  And then it won the audience prize in the Moscow Film Festival.  So, you know, we've got a theme here because like the audience love it, and whenever I got to the festivals half of the crowd may be hard core Formula 1 people, but the other half are people who have just heard that it's a good film.

How difficult it was to get the permission from the family and from Bernie Ecclestone?

That process happened before pretty much I came on board.  It was the Producer, James Gay-Rees, and the Exec Producer/Writer, Manish Pandey.  James had the idea to make the film 'cause his Dad worked for John Player Special; his Dad worked with Senna, because his Dad knew him quite well when he was driving the Lotus car.  His Dad used to come home from work talking about Senna …

By the end of the film you get the impression that Alain Prost ends up having tremendous respect for Ayrton Senna.

I think that rivalry became really, really nasty, but the thing was he was there at the funeral, he did turn up.  He was brave enough to come along, go to Brazil – he was carrying the coffin – he is a trustee of the foundation.  So I think by the end of it, you know, what people say when they're in the middle of a big rivalry, you sometimes say things that you don't mean, both of them did things and said things that they probably regretted. Had [Senna] lived to his 50s, the pair of them, they would have sat down with a bottle of wine and they'd be complaining about Lewis Hamilton now, probably, they'd be complaining about someone else. Because that's what you do isn't it?  You get old and you say, "Oh, it's not like it was in our day."

The sadness is they just didn't get time to do that; they didn't get to the age where they were able to sort it all out and say, "What were we like?" Tragically, he was taken at a point when the rivalry was still pretty bitter.  But, you know, that moment in Australia in 1993 when they were on the podium together, it's a really powerful moment.

The Senna film opens in cinemas around Australia on Thursday August 11, 2011. Check out the