‘Amy’ Director Asif Kapadia Recalls Three-Act Quest to Becoming an Oscar Winner

Asif Kapadia John Phillips/Getty Images

Asif Kapadia has built a Oscar-winning career creating his own distinct documentary style portraying ambitious and tragic figures like the late singer Amy Winehouse, the late Formula One race car driver Ayrton Senna and the Argentinian soccer great Diego Maradona.

And Kapadia, while appearing at the MIA Market in Rome on Thursday, took care to plot that career in three drama acts. His creative journey’s set-up was as a young man and the youngest of five children discovering his passion. “Working on a student film changed my life,” he recalled of a lightbulb moment that launched him as an aspiring filmmaker.

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The middle part had Kapadia confronting the possibility of sustaining a career. “Something you just get through, you have a family and you have to pay the bills,” he remembered of a stage in his career where he mostly worked for other people and did and learned about everything on a film set.

And his career’s third act, as Kapadia has gotten older and more experienced, is reaching the fame and fortune of an Academy Award-winning artist. “If you’re lucky, you get to pick and choose what you make, what you do and what you want to say because now you are looking back and looking forward,” he explained.

Setting his career to a drama structure is natural for Kapadia because he trained in fiction filmmaking well before an interest in sports and its drama steered him towards making feature documentaries. Not surprisingly, he also describes his best-known documentaries as “genre films.”

“Senna is an action movie. He’s an action hero,” Kapadia explained. Amy is music-driven Bollywood film that uses the sound and lyrics of popular songs to drive emotion. “And Diego Maradona was a gangster film,” Kapadia also told his Rome audience as he looked back on his prodigious film output.

Senna, the feature documentary about the Brazilian Formula One champion who was killed on the track at age 34, put Kapadia’s career into high gear. “The idea of how do you create drama and character when you have a story of people racing at 300 kilometers an hour, wearing a helmet and coming in and going — why should anyone care? So you have to find the scenes where you care about the characters,” Kapadia said of using uncovered early videos to tell Senna’s story about fighting the system and the F1 circuit rules for car driver safety.

Pre-digital-era tapes, including home videos, also figure in Amy and Diego Maradona. “You have a tape that someone kept and it sits on a shelf and one day someone comes along to watch it,” the director said of using archival footage, rather than talking heads, to tell his non-fiction stories.

His next breakout and Oscar-winning documentary, Amy, also used home movies and clips from studio song tapings to tell the story of a superstar singer who was also an addict who ended up generating as many headlines for her off-stage life as much as for her songs and albums. “I wouldn’t say I was the world biggest fan. But I started listening to the music and reading the lyrics,” Kapadia recalled of researching her life around a year after her death.

The question of why people close to Winehouse did not care for her during her struggles occupied Kapadia’s mind as he made the documentary. Crucially, the director laid down rules with Winehouse’s music label and family to ensure he could retain creative control while making the documentary about a troubled, yet genius artist.

One scene in Amy features a previously unseen recording by Mark Ronson of her classic “Back to Black” song being performed in a studio for the first time in 2006.

“She did two takes, got bored and went home,” Kapadia said of the moment.

In Diego Maradona, Kapadia explored in another music-driven documentary the life and times of the diminutive Argentinian soccer player who captained his country to World Cup glory while at the height of his powers and is often regarded as the greatest soccer player the world has ever seen.

In Rome, Kapadia showed the original sizzle reel for Diego Maradona, which he used to raise financing in Cannes. “There wasn’t a script or anything like that. So I have to make a short film to figure out what the documentary is,” he explained.

The MIA Market wraps on Friday.