IBC
At
one point in the new film about his life, Diego Maradona says: “I played
football because I didn’t want to return to Villa Fiorito.”
The documentary
suggests that the intensity of his battles on the pitch, and the insecurities
he exhibited in a chaotic life off it, was forged in the poverty of the Buenos
Aires shantytown where he grew up and the subsequent sudden shock of his
superstardom.
“People only
remember the latter version of Maradona, his deceit, his drug problems, his
obesity,” says director Asif Kapadia. “They forget how incredible he was. They
think they know him, but they do not. That’s what this film sets out to reveal
and confront.”
Sport biopics
are not new to Kapadia, nor are talented but flawed and tragic subjects. His
previous documentary features, Senna,
about Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna, and Amy,
about the late singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse, share similarities with
Kapadia’s treatment of the 60-year old ex-footballer.
Tabloid
journalism has turned the Argentine into both genius and pariah, but Kapadia
unearths a more complex, sympathetic but still enigmatic character.
“There’s a bit
of Senna and Amy in Diego,” says Kapadia, who travelled to Dubai to interview
him on several occasions. “Like Senna, he is a Latin American hero of the
people. Like Amy, I don’t think he’s ever been able to feel comfortable in his
own skin. For whatever reason it got to the point with both that even when
things were going well, they would push away the people who cared for them.
It’s linked to their addiction, but it’s also linked to being a child star.”
Subverting documentaries
The
Londoner has spent four years, on and off, making the film although the idea
came from a book he’d read long before making his first documentary.
“I wanted to
test myself with somebody who is still around and to tell a different type of
story about what happens when you get older if you’re a star.”
Personal
challenge is important to Kapadia’s own motivation. His graduation short from
the Royal College of Art, Sheep Thief, was shot on
16mm using a non-professional cast in Rajasthan. It won multiple awards.
His first
feature The Warrior (2001) was
shot in the Himalayas and desert regions of India and in Hindi, winning the
BAFTA for Best British Film. Next, he went to the Arctic tundra to shoot Far North, a psychological drama starring Sean
Bean and Michelle Yeoh.
In contrast to director Paul Greengrass, who has taken his
background in documentaries into gritty dramas ripped from the headlines (United 93; 22 July),
Kapadia made the switch from fiction to documentary “intentionally to subvert
the genre” by treating real-life stories like a drama.
This included
ditching the customary talking heads and narrative voiceover for a more
intimate approach that managed to tap into the vulnerability of his
personality. Senna’s depiction of the
Brazilian’s fate is almost spiritual.
Amy, on the hand, became a
musical. He says: “My family background is in India and Bollywood films use
songs to tell narrative. Clearly Amy is not here to talk to, but we do have her
songs and her lyrics which are very personal and in the film, they become her
voice to help us understand what was going on in her head.”
Of the switch
from drama to documentary, Kapadia explains that he went through “a mid-life,
existential crisis” between ten and 15 years ago when he realised he’d fallen
out of love with fiction and with the process of making it.
“I’d spent all
my life watching and working on drama,” he explains. “Making one was the gold
standard, everything I’d aimed for, but I just wasn’t being engaged any more. I
felt that most movies I saw were just pretending to tell incredible stories.”
True fiction
Kapadia
says his interest in film had always been in the cinema of Japan and Asia,
France and Italy but that his own attempts at ‘world cinema’, like The Warrior, had been tough.
“Without making a film in
the English language and without a major star you just cannot get incredible
stories with big characters financed,” he says. “I guess I sat down one day and
realised that there are incredible, powerful stories about huge characters
waiting to be told that didn’t require the pretence of fiction. Amy, Aryton…
there’s nothing formulaic about their lives. These are characters who lived
their lives in ways that just couldn’t be made up.”
Even better,
the material to tell their story was already out there.
“With Senna, everything was free to view on YouTube.
Anyone could have seen the footage. There were fans in France and Brazil asking
what a Brit is going to tell us about Aryton – until they saw the film. We
managed to take all these materials, we did the looking and we showed his
amazing life in a way that hadn’t been done before.”
The mix of
archive pictures overlaid with mostly contemporary audio from interviews
conducted by Kapadia is styled as “true fiction”.
“One of the
things I find frustrating about drama is that the process can somehow kill
spontaneity,” he says. “It can lock you down to what you want to say but with
documentary, I can be investigative and journalistic.”
He continues,
“I begin by doing a lot of research. I look at footage, read books, throw the
net as wide as I can to find out everything about a character. Only after a
year or two of the writing process do we start to find what looks like a story.
We’ll do interviews which often throws up more questions. We’re constantly
asking what we can show; how can we tell an idea. It’s very organic and
evolved. Also, I like to change my mind and start again which is entirely
contrary to how you would direct fiction.”
There’s
criticism of the documentary conventions which preceded Senna. “The personal experience of the
documentary maker on the subject matter - their voiced narration, sometimes
their filmed presence, often distracts from the story. I wanted to treat [the
subject matter] like a movie and find a way to present it so the audience could
form their own idea.”
That
sentiment goes double for Diego Maradona who has been the subject of countless
video articles, highlights reels and documentaries including a feature by Emir
Kusturica which The Guardian dubbed a
“fawning biopic”.
“Diego
is a tricky character but the journey to making a film about him often becomes
the film. I wasn’t interested in that at all.”
Kapadia’s style
is also to use a kaleidoscope of picture and sound manipulation. He studied
graphic design before film and the influence shows.
“I was at a
show on print making and pop art at the Hayward Gallery last year and it popped
into my head that essentially what we are doing is like [Andy] Warhol: taking
footage and making something else with it,” he says.
“We’re taking material and zooming or panning into it, altering
its colour, slowing it down, adding text and music, clipping dialogue, taking
interviews from here and there to create a new interpretation which, I hope, is
somehow more aesthetic, more political, deeper, emotional.”
After Amy became the UK’s
most successful documentary with earnings in excess of $25 million, Kapadia had
his pick of projects. Through On the Corner Films, the production company he
runs with producer James Gay-Rees, he exec produced another football doc about
troubled Brazilian striker Ronaldo; a retrospective
look back at Oasis (Supersonic) and last year’s
hard hitting three part examination of police inaction following the racist
murder of Stephen Lawrence.
He has also
returned to fiction, directing Ali and
Nino, an adaptation of a classic romantic novel set in Azerbaijan,
and two episodes of Netflix serial killer series Mindhunter for
showrunner David Fincher.
A bio-doc of
boxer Mike Tyson is rumoured and would make an obviously juicy next target for
Kapadia’s attention.
“I am
interested in taking not particular likeable characters and humanising them,”
he says. You’ve got to have interest in humanising them but without passing
your own judgement. I guess if someone were to run a line through my work all
the way from the Royal College of Art to today you might suggest they are about
outsiders. One of my tutors at film school made that observation but it’s not
something I’ve consciously thought about.”
His trilogy of
documentaries is about talent brutally short-circuited by the system. If Senna,
in Kapadia’s film, was the tragedy of one man versus the commercial machine,
Winehouse is portrayed as a working-class hero whose wings were burned by the
media. Maradona, for all his faults - including a drug compromised relationship
with the Camorra - is fighting demons not always of his own making.
Where Amy controversially suggested that
Winehouse’s spiral downwards could have been suspended by her family, it’s
clear from Diego Maradona that his
parents were nothing if not supportive.
“Diego left
home very early,” adds Kapadia. “He’s been searching for a home ever since.
Just the fact of where I had to travel - Barcelona, Dubai, Argentina and Italy
- in order to catch up with him shows that he never stays in one place for
long.
“Really, the
place that was closest to home was Naples.”
