The family didn't want that

We've been discussing Senna, his biopic about the tragic Brazilian formula one motor racing star. After winning the world cinema audience award for documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, it has quietly become one of the most successful documentaries released in Britain. It also played strongly at the Sydney Film Festival and is poised for a US release that could put it in frame for an Oscar. ''There's only one documentary we'll never overtake - Fahrenheit 9/11,'' says Kapadia, a Londoner, of the film's performance in his home country. Michael Moore's 2004 documentary has, like Ayrton Senna in the 1993 Brazilian grand prix, an unassailable lead in this race. Advertisement: Story continues below True hero ... Ayrton Senna. Kapadia's achievement is all the more remarkable in that his film is set in a sporting milieu often regarded as unremittingly snoozeworthy. ''The challenge was to make a film that appealed to people who think formula one is about men driving in circles in oversized cigarette packets,'' he says. ''I guess we must have done it.'' He's already thinking about the next project. ''I'd love to do a film about another sport. There's a story there,'' he says, nodding at the TV in a trendy London bar. ''The Tour de France would make a great movie. Drugs, corruption, political chicanery, guys risking their lives - everything you need for a great sports drama.'' Getting permission to use old race footage was key to Kapadia's success with Senna. Improbably, the little-known filmmaker elbowed aside some of Hollywood's biggest names to make a movie about the most charismatic motor racing star Rosetta Stone . ''Lots of filmmakers over the years approached the Senna family,'' Kapadia says. ''Oliver Stone, Michael Mann and I'm pretty sure Ridley Scott all approached and were told, 'No'. Antonio Banderas wanted to play Senna.'' Why were they rebuffed? ''The main thing was they all wanted to make a film about his final weekend at Imola in 1994. The family didn't want that. They preferred what we wanted to do, which was a three-act drama celebrating his life, from archive footage.'' The idea for the film came in 2004 when producer James Gay-Rees read an article about Senna on the 10th anniversary of his death. Gay-Rees and Kapadia pitched the idea for a documentary to the British production company Working Title. ''The executive said, 'You've got to meet my husband, he's Senna's biggest fan'.'' That husband was Manish Pandey, who became the writer on Senna. ''He's a surgeon but he's seen every race and knows every stat. So Manish and James worked out the story and pitched it to the family. Manish was such a fan that they trusted him like nobody else.'' Kapadia's CV didn't suggest he had what it took to direct a film about an adrenalin-charged sport, with a protagonist who lived fast and died young in a high-speed crash. He had made confident, quiet, leisurely paced art films - The Warrior, a 2001 Hindi-language feature set in the deserts of feudal-era Rajasthan, and 2007's Far North, a harrowing portrait of human loneliness in the Arctic wastes. The little-seen Hollywood thriller The Return, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, is the only blot on his resume. ''I learnt a lot from that - this is show business, not show friendship,'' he says. Kapadia knew a little about F1 before the film, he says.

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