In Asif Kapadia’s filmmaking universe, the most transformative creative moments often emerge from periods of constraint. The Oscar-winning director of Amy and Senna works with a methodology that might appear paradoxical to outsiders: he thrives within limitations, embraces the accidents, and above all, protects his vision by maintaining a conspicuous silence until the work is ready to speak for itself.
“I generally have a process of working very quietly and I never do press while I’m making something,” Kapadia explains, sitting in his London studio. “I only do press when it’s coming out.” This patient approach, refined over decades of crafting visually stunning narratives, has become fundamental to how he builds his cinematic worlds—both within documentary and fiction.
His method begins with an extended period of immersion, where he studies his subjects with a nearly anthropological intensity. For Senna, his groundbreaking documentary about Formula One legend Ayrton Senna, a contractual delay that might have demoralised another filmmaker instead became pivotal to his vision.
“It was nine or ten months where I was meant to be making it, but the contracts were taking so long,” he recalls. “I couldn’t hire anyone, I couldn’t shoot anything.” During this limbo, Kapadia would go to his office daily, studying YouTube clips of Senna with just an assistant editor, absorbing every nuance of his subject.
“I literally had worked out how to do the film using footage with no interviews, with him narrating it, before I’d officially started on it,” he says. This approach—eschewing talking heads in favour of pure archival immersion—would become a signature technique, though it faced significant resistance from producers and studios.
“Everyone’s like, ‘But that’s what documentaries do,'” he remembers being told repeatedly. “‘They have someone, the filmmaker, holding the microphone, the filmmaker’s voiceover, interviews with who’s talking.'” Kapadia’s response was resolute: “For me, that’s bad filmmaking. It should all just be a film.”
The Shadow of Scorsese
While Kapadia has developed his own distinctive visual language, he acknowledges Martin Scorsese as a persistent influence. The relationship between the two filmmakers has evolved beyond mere admiration into a genuine creative dialogue.
“He’s someone I know who has seen my films and I’ve talked to him quite a lot over the years,” Kapadia says. “When I’m in New York, I’d just call up his office and say, ‘Look, I’m in New York.’ And they’d be like, ‘Yeah, come over for tea.’ And I’d go to his house for a cup of tea.”
What Kapadia values most about Scorsese isn’t just his narrative technique but his versatility—how the director of Taxi Driver and Goodfellas moves fluidly between documentary and fiction. “He’s always done both docs and drama, and I’ve always kind of liked that,” Kapadia notes, referencing Scorsese’s documentaries about the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and George Harrison.
The parallels run deeper still. Just as Scorsese made the intimate documentary Italianamerican about his parents while working on Taxi Driver, Kapadia has developed a rhythm of making smaller, faster projects while his epic, years-long documentaries evolve at their own pace.
Working Fast, Working Slow
In Kapadia’s creative ecosystem, films exist on different temporal planes. While Senna, Amy, and 2073 each required around five years to complete, he deliberately embarks on faster projects in the interim.
“I used to do drama and documentaries at the same time, and now I kind of make a short doc while I’m making a longer doc,” he explains. This approach allows him to maintain creative momentum while his more ambitious works gestate.
During the pandemic, he made Creature, a ballet film featuring choreographer Akram Khan—something entirely outside his comfort zone. “I’ve never been to the ballet, I don’t know anything about ballet, I don’t know anything about dance,” he admits. Yet the constraint of a 10-day shoot and a three-week edit created an energy that he finds creatively invigorating.
“You’re freer,” he says of these faster productions. “The budget is often smaller, or you have a deadline.” This deadline, according to Kapadia, is the essential catalyst for creativity. “The thing that you need in life is a deadline. If you’re forced to do something, you will come up with a solution, a creative answer.” His current project about Liverpool football legend Kenny Dalglish follows this rapid approach.
The Documentary Renaissance
The streaming era has fundamentally changed the landscape for documentary filmmakers, a shift that Kapadia acknowledges with cautious optimism.
“I think that has changed with Netflix primarily, and people are less worried about languages or where the people are from in the world,” he notes. “I think we kind of had a boom time at the cinema and then cinema turned against docs and went towards Marvel and comic books and sequels. And then we had a sort of boom time on streamers.”
Kapadia’s own influence on this renaissance is significant. His archive-only approach in Senna helped establish a new framework for documentary storytelling, one that has been widely imitated—though as he notes, “They don’t always pull it off.”
For Kapadia, the documentary’s ascendance makes perfect sense. “Why is an actor pretending more important than the real person?” he asks, with a characteristic directness. “It’s crazy. They’re never going to be as good. Muhammad Ali is Muhammad Ali. No actor can be Muhammad Ali.”
Trust Your Gut
When asked what advice he would give to emerging filmmakers, Kapadia’s philosophy distils to several core principles: have a deadline, finish what you start, trust your gut, and learn from what goes wrong.
“Even if it’s not great, you have to just finish it at some point and then put it out there,” he insists. “I know too many people who are brilliant but who never finish anything.”
This commitment to completion carries through to his refusal to revisit or “fix” earlier work. “Whatever you make, it’s like you at a particular point of your life and then you’re not that person again,” he explains. “When you get older or when you’ve had kids or when you get married or you get divorced or something, you’re different. But you’re not going to make that film again.”
His most recent work, 2073—a hybrid documentary that imagines a dystopian future through the lens of present-day journalism—exemplifies this philosophy of perseverance. “It had a lot of negative energy, nobody wanted to fund it,” he recalls. “People were not into the idea. They were like, ‘Why do you want to do something? It’s so depressing.’ I was like, ‘Well, I have to do it.'”
The film went on to become the number one movie on HBO Max with little promotion, resonating with viewers who connected with its urgent warning about authoritarianism and climate collapse.
Ultimately, for Kapadia, filmmaking comes down to an unwavering fidelity to one’s own instincts. “The way I look at it is, the only way you can do this is you don’t worry what other people say. You have to just follow your gut.”
In an industry increasingly driven by algorithms and market research, Kapadia’s adherence to a more intuitive, personal approach stands as both a creative principle and a quiet form of resistance. He works quietly, follows his instincts, and then—when the time is right—lets the work speak for itself.