Forget the wacky conspiracy theories: the documentary Sennacast its net wide to find rare footage that enabled Ayrton Senna, the extraordinary Brazilian who died in a Grand Prix crash in 1994, to narrate his own story, as director Asif Kapadia tells TARA BRADY
IT WAS a ghoulish YouTube moment long before anyone thought to share videos with strangers online. In 1994, when Formula One champion Ayrton Senna crashed his car into a wall at a speed of more than 200 miles per hour before a worldwide audience of some 300 million viewers, no one could have foretold how widely the moment of impact would be subsequently disseminated and dissected. In the immediate aftermath a controversy ensued, as fans and pundits questioned whether the accident was caused by driver error or faulty equipment.
Fifteen years on and the “truths” are out there. A thriving cottage industry has sprung up around the Brazilian hero and his tragic accident; there are biographies, hagiographies, vigils, TV shows and, most of all, internet rumours.
Particularly preposterous accounts factor in Hitler, Goebbels, Max Mosley and the plot of The Boys From Brazil. Senna's car's telemetry "black box" had several data channels physically cut, argue believers; the Italian authorities impounded the smashed vehicle for more than 10 years; how can you say Mussolini wasn't linked? Others have puzzled over the steering wheel, G-force, angle of impact and a date of death, they say, was chosen to coincide with the foundation day of the Illuminati in 1776.
Senna, an award-winning documentary about one of Formula One’s most famous sons, gives such conspiracy theories a wide berth. Asif Kapadia’s riveting film, composed entirely from archive footage – much of it culled from hitherto unexplored Formula One vaults – allows the late driver to tell and enact his own story directly to camera.
"I had that instinct really early on, but it took a long time persuading everyone else," says Kapadia. "If you look at all the successful documentaries – Kevin Macdonald's Touching the Voidor James Marsh's Man on Wire– they all have talking heads as reference points. This is what a good cinema documentary looks like. But I'm not a documentary film-maker. And the existing footage of the subject was so powerful. My notion was I can interview people but I can't interview Senna. And if I can't interview my main character it's going to become just another film where everyone gives their opinion. We had to find a way for him to be the hero and narrator of the film."
Kapadia, the acclaimed British director of The Warriorand The Return,had little difficulty in finding extraordinary images to illustrate an extraordinary life. Senna's entire career – from his early karting successes in Brazil and teenage forays into British Formula Three races – was heavily, nay obsessively chronicled.
“It’s the nature of that sport,” says Kapadia. “It’s a TV sport watched and followed by millions of people. You always have cover shots. Once we worked out what we were trying to say it was a question of finding the right footage in Sao Paulo or Japan or Monaco or wherever. By selecting key races we could cut between wide shots, close-ups, helicopter shots – just as if we were making an action film. It’s a comment on the nature and scale of his fame that all the clips we needed were already out there.”
All told, Kapadia’s team – including Tim Bevan and screenwriter Manish Pandey – have worked some seven years on the intricate project. The subject, says Kapadia, gave them a free pass with the late driver’s family, Formula One authorities and motor sports mogul Bernie Ecclestone, who granted access to his own personal video collection.
"Bernie's bunker was amazing. Basically once the team had persuaded the family that this was going to be a film made by Senna fans – not about the sport or an underdog victory – then everybody said yes, including Bernie. His stuff was a revelation. We got to know by the name of the camera operator what kind of footage we had. A couple of French names kept coming up because they were brilliant cinematographers. There's a scene with Senna arguing with Formula One authorities that was shot in a way that would have made The Hurt Locker's Barry Ackroyd proud. It was a 45-minute sequence from a press conference, never intended to see the light of day, but the camera operator put in reaction shots and medium shots just purely out of professional pride.
“Our main problem was editing all the material down. We managed a seven-hour cut, then a five-hour version; it took us years to get it down to under two hours for a theatrical audience.”
Senna charts the dashing Brazilian’s rise to superstardom. A romantic outsider, Senna enters the sport in a comparatively lowly vehicle and takes on the sport’s status quo.
The middle section of the film is devoted to Senna’s titanic rivalry with French driver Alain Prost and with the Formula One authorities. The latter may have co-operated fully, but the organisation does not emerge well. The politics underscoring Senna’s switches between Toleman-Hart, Lotus- Renault and McLaren-Honda are nasty and brutal, the daily rule changes are baffling and the institutionalised inequality of the sport is increasingly infuriating to behold.
“I suppose that’s what Formula One was like back then,” says Kapadia. “A lot of those people aren’t around any more, and Bernie never said anything. There were no external pressures, but among ourselves there were scenes we uncovered and we really had to sit down and ask, ‘Can we show this? Can we talk about this?’ Some of the lines Formula One’s Jean-Marie Balestre comes out with are unbelievable. It doesn’t matter that Senna has concerns about safety and his colleagues. The response is the same: ‘The best decision is my decision.’ Ironically, a lot of the safety issues Senna fought for came in as a result of his death.”
By keeping Senna in the picture, a complex, Shakespearean portrait emerges. His bravado on the track is matched by charitable impulses off it, an aspect of Senna’s life that has resulted in his unofficial canonisation back in Sao Paulo. Senna had ploughed more than $100 million – more than half his earnings – into his Brazilian foundation (ASF) at the time of his death. His sense of justice and deep spirituality seem to frame the final film, even during very amusing exchanges that might otherwise be read as boys’ own pissing contests.
“On track he was the tough guy,” nods Kapadia. “Off it he was the one who cared about everyone. He’s the guy who would stop his car on the track and run in front of other drivers to get to an accident scene.
“I’ve looked at thousands of hours of Formula One races and material, and no one else ever did that. Drivers don’t want to see an accident; it’s damaging for them to dwell on an accident or a fatality. He’d charge at the authorities demanding to know how it happened and what could be done to prevent it from happening again. His best friend, the Formula One doctor Prof Watson pointed us to an incident in 1992. Senna’s having a terrible year but he sees an accident, stops his car, jumps out, runs across, almost gets hit by a another car and he holds the injured driver’s head and neck until the medics arrive. The doctor says they’ll never know for sure, but if everything he did was so medically precise he probably saved the guy’s life. Then he got back out there as fast as ever.”
With this in mind, the film’s final scenes make for particularly affecting viewing. Time and again, we’ve watched Senna take on the authorities only to hit the track with equal vigour. The events at the ill-starred 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, however, seem to have him licked. The lead-up to the fatal accident is well documented. What BBC’s Murray Walker called “the blackest day for Grand Prix racing” claimed the life of Austrian driver Roland Ratzenberger and left Rubens Barrichello and several mechanics injured, all in separate incidents.
During the subsequent inquest, British driver Damon Hill noted, “I set my car up in a way where I thought I could finish the race. I didn’t think Senna could.”
But regardless of the mechanics, even 17 years on, the entire occasion feels poisoned and doomed.
“You can see it in his eyes,” says Kapadia. “It was painful even looking at that footage. Even before the accidents there was a sense that the entire weekend was cursed. This is a sport that’s about the richest. The richest, the fastest, the best, start at the front; the poorest and weakest start at the back. But Senna’s answer to everything was always to go faster and show them all. You can see he doesn’t want to be there after Ratzenberger’s accident. And he’s visibly torn, because this is all he has ever wanted to do but he doesn’t love it any more. His best friend, the doctor, is asking him to quit. And he just can’t.
“There are a lot of drivers who win titles who are happy to drive for points. Senna had to be the fastest. He had to win. And we do know that when they took him to hospital they cut him out of his clothes and found an Austrian flag. He wanted to raise it for Roland Ratzenberger. He wanted to do it for the other guy.”
Kapadia knew he had fashioned a tearjerker, but he has been astonished by audience reactions. At the time of writing, Sennahas already broken box-office records in Brazil and Japan. Earlier this year it took home the World Cinema Audience Award in the documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival; the American voters, unschooled in the culture of Formula One, could not identify the protagonist going in to the screenings.
“It’s amazing,” says the director. “People said we had no chance of getting it out in the US, so we ended up taking the film to Sundance ourselves. We had no press, no PR, we didn’t even have posters – and we won the audience prize where people at the screening didn’t necessarily know the ending. We had a screening for the family when they flew over to see Bruno – that’s Senna’s nephew, who you see as a kid in the film – driving in the Monaco Grand Prix. It was a very emotional experience.
“They’d laugh when he was talking, but they couldn’t stop sobbing. We showed it to Ron Dennis, who cried. We showed it to the Formula One journalists in Brazil – that was nervy, but they cried too. There’s just something about Senna.”
From the vaults: Best archive documentaries
WHEN WE WERE KINGS
Director Leon Gast mulled over footage for some of Ali and Foreman’s Rumble in the Jungle for almost 22 years to assemble this tremendous, 1996 Academy Award winner.
TARNATION
Jonathan Caouette’s sublime 2005 account of growing up gay and Texan with a bipolar mother – one of the greatest movies ever – was cobbled together from old home movies, recordings and pictures, and edited with the free software that comes with a MacBook.
THE FOG OF WAR
Errol Morris, the greatest documentarian of the age, is best known for intimate interviews, quirky subjects and re-enactments. This Academy Award- winning film shows he’s just as deft in the archives.
END OF THE CENTURY
Joey and Dee Dee had already left for the big high-school bop in the sky when Jim Fields and Michael Gramaglia made their smash hit music doc. Candid testimonies from surviving Ramones are augmented with long-lost footage.
GRIZZLY MAN
Timothy Treadwell was a fanatical self-chronicler, conservationist and ursine enthusiast until he and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by a bear in 2003. Director Werner Herzog pieced together Treadwell’s video diaries into this intriguing film. Crucially, he omits the death scene.
