The British film-maker Asif Kapadia grew up in north London and established himself with his 2001 debut The Warrior. In 2010 he made the documentary Senna, about F1 racing driver Ayrton Senna. It was followed by the Oscar-winning Amy Winehouse portrait Amy (2015) and Diego Maradona (2019). Kapadia’s television work includes documentary series The Me You Can’t See, 1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything and crime drama Mindhunter. This month he is guest curator at Sheffield DocFest.
These days you’re best known as a documentarist, but documentary wasn’t your first love…
I grew up watching drama and I studied directing fiction. Whenever I make a film, my references are always movies. So when I made Senna I was thinking: “This is Sunset Boulevard – this is going to be narrated by a character, and you only realise at the end that they’re dead.”
