Asif Kapadia has been making films ‘in one form or another’ since he was 17. The director is best known for his trilogy of narrative-driven documentaries, Senna, Diego Maradona, and Amy, the latter of which won the 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His latest movie, 2073, mixes documentary and drama to depict a future where environmental destruction and fascism have run rampant.
Ahead of his scheduled appearance at Brand Week Istanbul on 10-14 November [which is owned by MediaCat UK’s parent company], we sat down with Kapadia about the transformation of the film industry, his perspective on storytelling, and the disruption within the media landscape.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You grew up in a vibrant, multicultural part of Hackney, and you’ve said that gave you a different point of view when you entered the more traditional British film world. How did your journey and that specific perspective of observing from the peripheries inform your ability to find the isolated human being at the center of the myth?
Growing up in North London with friends who were from all over the world, everyone had a different name, language and food. You don’t think about it when you’re young but it makes a big impression, feeling like you live in London but are aware of the rest of the world. As I studied and went through further education – to college, university and postgrad – and as I went through my career, I became more and more aware that I was a minority, that there were very few people that look like me or sound like me. Being from a different background, having a different sensibility or speaking more than one language I think affect the work that you create. You’re not afraid of these people from another part of the world because in a way you’ve always related to them. My work very much is a continuation of that. If I make a film in Argentina about Diego Maradona, I’m going to make it in the language that he speaks.
Your films are celebrated for their emotional authenticity and for capturing the truth of a moment in its unpolished state. In contrast, generative AI often strives for technical perfection. Do you believe AI’s pursuit of flawlessness risks erasing the very human texture that makes your films so powerful? How do you weigh the value of raw footage against the new possibilities of AI-enhanced or AI-generated content in film making?
I started off making feature films and the intention was originally to look for some sort of visual perfection — spending a lot of time going to a location, on the design, on the look, and the type of camera. I come from that period when everything was physical, shooting on film, editing on film, projecting on film, which is all gone. Gradually it’s all become digital. Now we’re going into another phase. I have embraced digital work and digital post-production. But I’m less comfortable with me and my work being used in a way to teach the machine to make me unnecessary in the future.
A lot of your previous films rely on collective memory shaped by some type of mainstream media. If a young Amy Winehouse or Maradona were to emerge today, their story wouldn’t necessarily be a centralised narrative, but thousands of fragmented competing narratives on countless different platforms. Is it still possible to create a definitive biographical film?
The films that I made were possible because of the period of time they were made, the characters in them, and the technology that was available at the time. And I don’t think the same films would be made now because everyone is very self-aware. Everyone films themselves on their phones. It’s a different way of recording something if you have a phone versus physical media. Senna, Amy and Diego Maradona all exist in the form that they do because they were shot on physical tape of some form. There’s no editing that’s happened in between; therefore it has imperfections. It has things that people may not be comfortable with. Even if you’re working with an estate, when we got the material they could not sit there and say, ‘No, you can’t use that shot.’ But that’s the space we’re in now. Commercial people would rather make a feature film about themselves, which they produce and have a friend direct it. It’s basically an advert, but it’s just long.
Your most recent film, 2073, uses your experience in archival documentaries to tell a dystopian story about the future. You use real present-day footage to draw a direct line between today and this dystopian future that we think is far away. Why did you choose to approach the story in this way?
It’s a film looking at the state of the world — destruction of the planet, the breakdown of freedoms around the world, the technology that’s essentially taking over a lot of our lives and decisions, and the crossover between all of these. I started it during lockdown. I wanted to make a film different from the previous documentaries. It’s quite a hard film because I think we’re living in challenging times. I thought, ‘Okay, this one I’m going to do something different. I’m going to mix drama and documentary together.’ So there is a fiction element starring Samantha Morton. It’s a documentary, but it’s set in the future. It’s like a sci-fi dystopian horror documentary, which I don’t know if many people have done before. It uses footage from all over the world, journalists and people trying to hold power to account.
Brands are always interested in jumping on cultural moments captured by films. How do you work with brands in your own films? Do you work with them at all? How can brands create lasting partnerships with filmmakers?
Over the years brands have quietly supported me. I’ve previously done work for Burberry. That was a really interesting experience, telling the story of Burberry as if it was a trailer for a movie. It’s called The Tale of Thomas Burberry. It was an exciting job because we had a lot of history. The brand gave us everything that we needed. They delivered a brilliant cast. What was fascinating was, on that particular job, there wasn’t an agency. They contacted a screenwriter. The screenwriter came up with an idea and copied me as a director. We wrote scenes for a feature film that didn’t exist, which we shot as if we were shooting a feature film, and then cut the trailer for the feature film that we hadn’t made yet. It was a fun way of working. The meetings were very creative and it was just literally the brand and us.
How has marketing and distribution of films changed since you began your career? Where do you think that side of the industry is evolving towards?
All of the industries are changing incredibly fast. There are challenges depending on where you are in the world. It seems like in certain countries in Europe, cinema has come back and is doing well. People are attending.
In the US, it’s not doing so well for independent cinema. A lot of the financing comes from the US, and if people there don’t believe there is presently an industry for theatrical documentaries, then that trickles down to everywhere else. Then the pressure is you can’t do a theatrical release; you have to sell a film to a streamer. If a streamer has a certain taste, other films will not get made. It narrows the choices that you have. If they have a particular type of thing that they think works and nothing else will play to the audience, then it means those other films maybe don’t get made or seen. They don’t get international distribution or find a sales agent.
Living in the UK making independent cinema, I’ve never known it not to be difficult. That’s just normal. What happens is by the time you finish one project [it] may take two or three years. When you start the film, you’re dealing with certain executives. By the time you finish the film, you’re dealing with different executives. By the time the film comes out, there’s another group of executives, and the industry’s moved and changed. You just have to play the long game. I’ve been making films in one form or another since I was about 17. I’m in my 50s now and the industry has died about twenty times but, somehow, we’re still here. We’re still making things and people are still watching things.
The important thing is also to make films for the long term. Sometimes they may not have the biggest opening weekend. 2073 didn’t make a lot of money when it was first released in the US, but then it was the number-one movie on HBO in the US. Not the number one documentary, the number one feature film — with no publicity, no press, no marketing, no interviews.
Featured image: Amy – Official Trailer / YouTube