Senna: A Documentary That Redefines Authenticity and Emotional Storytelling 

There’s a natural assumption that documentaries are more authentic than ‘made up’ movies: if the footage is real then surely the facts are baked in? Of course the truth is that documentaries, especially popular ones, are edited and shaped into a compelling narrative just as slickly as any other movie.

Asif Kapadia’s 2011 work Senna is a good case in point. Watch the extended cut that runs to 162 minutes and you’ll see a nuanced, informative and detailed account of the times and a turbulent rivalry that approached friendship between two of the all-time greats, Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna. Watch the award-winning original cut, which is about an hour shorter and only uses existing footage (all the new interviews from the long version are just abbreviated voiceovers here), and you’ll see a more exhilarating, moving and brilliantly edited film… but one that does have the unfortunate side effect of making Prost out to be practically Dick Dastardly. A fact that did not go unnoticed by the Frenchman.

But in both versions, the strength of Senna’s appeal comes across, charming and dashing with the world’s press, humble and spiritual to the Brazilian nation that adored him and, to an extent, clung to him as a beacon of hope in difficult times.

The idea of making a documentary on the driver began with producer James Gay-Rees, whose father had worked for John Player Special, the tobacco company that sponsored Senna’s black Lotus in 1985.

“My dad would come back from these various races,” recalled Gay-Rees “and say that there was something really ‘other’ about this young guy. He was very unusual. He was not like the other young motor racing drivers. He was very sure of himself. He’d got very strong beliefs. He was very different and very intense.”

After trying for some time, Gay-Rees and writer/executive producer Manish Pandey finally secured a meeting with Senna’s family in 2006. Their plan was to make a presentation of their vision for a film and then ask their permission to make it.

“My wife told me not to cry during the presentation,” recalled Pandey. “Which was a risk because I get quite emotional, especially if I’m passionate about something, like I was with this project. She said to me, ‘You have to be very professional, or they’ll think you’re an idiot!’”

Pandey managed to run through his 40-minute presentation, a mixture of sounds, footage and stills, tear-free. But he was the only one. “I didn’t cry but everyone else in the room did,” said Pandey. “For 40 minutes, Ayrton’s sister, Viviane, and the rest of the family, were just crying their eyes out. At the end, Viviane stood up and gave me a hug and whispered in my ear, ‘You really knew my brother.’ We had never met but I think she got what we were trying to do.”

The pitch had won over the family partly because the filmmakers said they wouldn’t focus solely on Senna’s tragic death, but would also explore and celebrate his life.

“The most obvious way to tell a Senna story is to do ‘Three days in Imola,’— the race where Senna died, and that would have been a compelling movie, but an obvious one,” said Pandey. “You would do Friday, Saturday and Sunday and would probably flash back to establish why the character is there, using cut-in interviews and you would have a powerful film, but maybe a film that misses the point of him. And that’s where Asif Kapadia comes in. We interviewed a lot of directors but he got it.”

Kapadia was not a Formula 1 expert. In fact he knew little about the sport and came to the project with an open mind. “I had never read a book on Senna, or F1,” admitted the director. “I had never been to a race. I felt very much the outsider at the beginning of the process. But I think that gave me a fresh set of eyes on the material.”

As he dug deeper, Kapadia quickly became fascinated. “I could see that Senna was an amazing driver and he also had this deep spiritual side, which was fascinating. The challenge was to pare the film down to the bare minimum so that even somebody who doesn’t like F1, or had never heard of Senna, could understand the character and be moved by his story.”

“The characters are so rich. The rivalry so dramatic. It was violent, sexy and, ultimately, emotional and triumphant” Asif Kapadia, director

Kapadia’s approach is apparent right from the start of the film. Using an evocative mixture of old family videos, Brazilian TV footage, F1 archive material (including onboard footage) and media broadcasts of the time, we see the young Senna in a karting race, illustrating both his inherent natural ability and the no-holds barred driving style he would subsequently bring to F1. And by cannily using an old Senna interview as voice over, it also allows us to hear early on just how much he adored the pure thrill of driving. The same brilliant editing of archives and voiceover takes us through a decade and a half of defeats, triumph, soaring piopularity and ultimately tragedy at that fateful San Marino Grand Prix in 1994.

It was unusual to have a documentary that didn’t actually show the ‘talking heads’ — the interviewees — that the filmmakers had spoken with. Working Title co-owner Eric Fellner, a producer on the film, admits that Kapadia fought to do it that way, resisting any suggestions of showing them.

“I think it gives it a unique feel because most documentaries don’t have that,” said Fellner. “Yes, we had some voice over but you never cut away from the period and so you get a lot of Ayrton Senna. It feels like he is telling you the story all the way through and that was Asif’s big thing.”

The director was confident almost from the start. “Early on, Manish and I cut a 10-minute short just from YouTube footage,” recalled Kapadia. “And even from doing that we knew that this approach would work. I knew there was a brilliant film here. You had a beginning with his journey to success, a middle with the rivalries and challenges, and then a powerful ending, that was shocking, moving and tragic. What did we need to see talking heads for? My gut was always saying we should just let the images do the work. The more I looked at the footage, the more I realised it tells you the story.”

Fellner admitted he was unconvinced at first and wanted something more like the start of When We Were Kings, the documentary about the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali. That film featured an introduction from Norman Mailer that drew viewers in. “Asif resisted,” said Fellner, “and I think he was right. The footage and the way it is put together in the film is fantastic.”

To use official F1 footage, the filmmakers had to meet Bernie Ecclestone. They would need his assistance to get access to the F1 archive at Biggin Hill. Ecclestone owned every image shot on camera at an F1 meeting during the period covered in the film. After a challenging first meeting — “It was mostly Bernie’s lawyer beating us up for 40 minutes” recalled Pandey – Ecclestone agreed. And, a full 18 months of paperwork later, the filmmakers had their access to a treasure trove of footage.

It was here that Kapadia’s ‘fresh eyes’ were particularly helpful. Because he wasn’t overly familiar with F1 he didn’t necessarily gravitate to the most well-known incidents but instead judged the footage based on how visually strong it was: “I’d look at something and go, ‘Well, this is really interesting, even though it is not in any of the books’ or, sometimes, ‘This is in every book, but actually it is not that great.’” As an example of the latter, he cites Senna’s famous lap at Donington Park at the 1993 European Grand Prix. “It is amazing when you look at his driving, and how he wins in such an inferior car,” said Kapadia. “But visually, it’s grey, it’s pissing down with rain and no one is there. The camera work is awful. Even though they are driving at 190mph, it looks slow. Visually, it was just not good enough.”

Fortunately, there was plenty of compelling visuals and riveting moments to choose from, including many off the track, such as the drivers’ briefings which, in Kapadia’s words “felt like having a Ken Loach dialogue scene in the middle of an action film.”

Ultimately, it was this sharply selected mix that enchanted critics and broadened the film’s appeal beyond the F1 audience. Time Out called it “The most thorough look at the art and passion of auto racing yet made” while Empire declared the film was “ambitiously constructed, deeply compelling, thrilling and in no way only for those who like watching cars drive in circles.”

“I always approached it as a fiction film,” said Kapadia. “Documentaries are constructed, they have always used fictional techniques. Fiction films try all the time to be real. I wanted to find a new space or genre somewhere in the middle.”

Some observers questioned the subjectiveness of this approach, which not only paints Senna as the hero of the story but makes him out to be practically a modern day saint. But the filmmakers were unrepentant. As Manish Pandey commented: “This film is not ‘Ayrton, Alain, Nigel and Nelson’. This film is Senna.”

Senna

Released: 2010
Director: Asif Kapadia
Studio: StudioCanal, Working Title, Midfield Films
Stars: Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost
Gross: $10.9m