Interview by David Colenutt
Director Asif Kapadia has had a very good year. His debut feature The Warrior recently won the Alexander Korda BAFTA for Best British film, while Kapadia himself was the recipient of the Carl Foreman Award for the Most Promising Newcomer. This must have more than made up for the fact that the film was turned down as Britain’s official Foreign Language entry for this years Oscars purely on the grounds that Hindi isn’t an indigenous British language.
The Warrior has won the Douglas Hickox Award at the British Independent Film Awards, The ‘Golden Hitchcock’ at the Dinard British Film Festival, and The Sutherland Trophy at the 2001 London Film Festival. Add to this a host of accolades for his student short The Sheep Thief, and you begin to see why the director is one of Britain’s hottest properties. Not bad for a man who once directed a short at Dungeness (a competition entry – a commercial in the genre of a western, advertising toothpaste!)
The Warrior was the closing film at last year’s Kent International Film Festival, screening at Cinema 3 at the University of Kent, and the director made a welcome return to Kent on Easter Sunday. The Warrior was playing at Whitstable’s Imperial Oyster Cinema as part of the newly-launched Alternative Oyster Film Club’s new programme. He happily chatted to the packed auditorium, taking questions from the floor.r:
How did you come to direct The Warrior as your debut feature film?
The whole journey began with my student film, The Sheep Thief, which came from an idea that a teacher had told me at school, when I was seven years old or something. And I always thought, right! I want to make that into a story one day but I don’t know how to do it. The idea doesn’t seem to fit setting it in Wales or setting it in Ireland, so I never really did anything with it. And then I saw a French movie called Cyclo, by a French-Vietnamese director called Anh Hung Tran who is quite well known because his first film before that was called Mui du du xanh (The Scent of the Green Papaya), which I think was up for an Oscar and won the Golden Camera at Cannes. Cyclo was shot in Vietnam and it looked like it was directed by someone who understood the culture, who understood the place where he was filming in, but it was very much a European-type film. So it was like a European film shot in a place where someone knew what they were doing so that was a real moment for me, a lightbulb went on. At the time I was still at college, so I thought that was what I was going to do.
Did your cultural background play a part in bringing the film to the screen?
I thought I could make a film where I could use the Indian part of me. I’ve been brought up in London, lived all my life here, so I’m going to use the European-Londoney part together with my Indian background. And so that’s what I did with The Sheep Thief, went up and shot it in the desert with about seven of us. It cost £25,000 that we raised ourselves, and the film was really successful. It won about 15 prizes around the world, it won a prize at Cannes, it won another prize in Russia, in America, in the middle-East, in France, Germany everywhere, apart from here actually (Laughs). It didn’t even get selected for a lot of festivals, so what I learned was, if you make a film and it does well abroad, people over here like your film. Whereas when I showed it to people here, it was turned down by Edinburgh, it was turned down by The British Short Film Festival,by everyone. They ended up showing it at the London Film Festival but it got turned down by everyone else.
Did this help you at all to break the British film industry or give you any kind of a springboard?
Yeah, it was off the back of that that I met a lot of people in the industry. When I came up with an idea to make my first feature I thought well, ok, why don’t I use that short film to get my foot on that ladder. My co-writer is a guy called Tim Miller, and he actually taught at film school, and he mentioned to me this little story, literally a footnote, about three or four lines in a book of Japanese stories. There is one particular scene in The Warrior where a young boy of about seven or eight, is shown a severed head and asked “Is this your father?” and the boy knows it’s not but he lies and pretends it is to save his father’s life. And that was it, just that one little moment and this is actually a true story. I just though it was such a powerful scene, that actually the entire movie grew out of that one scene. So Tim and I just made it up as to what happened before that moment to get to that point.
So after the script was finished, you turned your attention towards shooting it?
The question was, where do we shoot it? It doesn’t feel right to shoot it in England. By now, I had shot abroad and I wasn’t really afraid of doing so again. At one point we actually considered the idea of shooting it in Japan but we thought, don’t be silly I don’t even speak the language, it’s really expensive there and no-one is going to let me go there for my first film. But as I had already had a successful short film, I thought, why don’t we relocate it to India, and instead of Samurai India has its own kind of history of this type of warrior called the Rajput. They were the people who ruled the whole of the desert region and Afghanistan all the way up to Pakistan. So we thought, ok, we’ll relocate it in that world.
It must have felt like quite a big step up from doing a short to doing a feature. Did it feel daunting at all or was it a natural progression for you?
The thing is, it was a huge step. I mean, I made the short film in 1997 so there were about three years of not having made a film, of just writing and developing stuff and doing the rounds at festivals, and meeting people and stuff like that. When it got to the point of actually being out on location it was quite terrifying because there were so many people; there were about 250 people.
I was definitely one of the youngest people on the unit, so you’ve got all these people who you have to basically tell them what to do and collaborate with them, but you’re the only one there who has never done it before and because everyone else has that was quite strange. But the actual process, funnily enough, it’s really not that different from making the short film. The short film was so difficult, that’s part of the reason. It was such a big leap ahead of anything that I had done up until that point. And we really didn’t have the money and we were all kids, you know, we were all students and we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. By the time we made the feature, I was a bit older, everyone around me had seen it and done it all so they were all really competent at their own jobs and I just had to worry about my job.
So making the feature was a lot more professional than the short?
That’s the one thing when you’re making a student film, you’re kind of looking out so no-one else messes up. You know you’ve got keep an eye on everyone because certain people in certain situations aren’t that experienced. By the time you get to making a feature you’ve picked your crew the same way you have picked your actors, you pick the best people for the job, the best people for a film being made in India. And they’re really good at what they are doing so I don’t need to worry about their job, I just worry about my job.
What was it like directing non-actors compared to professionals?
I personally really enjoyed working that way. You have to set aside a large amount of time to find and cast the actors. You have a set idea of the character on the page and then you say “ok, why complicate matters by getting someone to pretend to be that person, why not find someone who is that person?” Then you talk with them, and you work with them, and whatever they do is what that character would do. If they do something differently then, within reason, I would change it so that they do whatever they find natural rather than me telling them every little moment. I am going to the other side of the world and am working within a culture that I haven’t been in.
Realism is clearly an important part of the film and using non-actors must have helped in this process?
There is always going to be a point where I might write something in North London and it’s just inaccurate. It would be crazy for me to get the actor do exactly what I’ve written, rather than them saying, “well look I wouldn’t do it like that, normally I would do this.” Then you go, “oh ok, that’s much better, it’s far more interesting, it’s less of a cliche.” So I really really enjoyed working with them because in a way, for me, it seems to make life simpler. You want to believe the performances, you want to believe that they are that person. And for me that is what works best.
You received a good critical reception for the film, Empire magazine said that you had “struck Indie gold” with it. You must be pleased with that and it must also give you a lot of confidence for your next film…
Yeah, so far so good, you know what it’s like, you really feel pleased and you want people to like the film and then it’s like “ok, now do it all again.” And that’s the crazy thing about making movies; no matter what happens, you just start all over from scratch for the next one. Hopefully, you have a good chance of getting a movie financed and hopefully if I can find a good enough idea and a strong enough central core to the story, I’m hoping we would be able to get finance. But it just takes as long as it takes to get to that stage and I suppose in a way I’m spoilt on The Warrior because I had a really good time. I was able to write the script I wanted to write and we managed to get the money without having to change anything. They were really good to us, they didn’t force me to do anything that I didn’t want to do. I was able to cast everyone I wanted to cast, I shot it where I wanted to shoot, I cut it the way I wanted to cut it, the poster was the poster I wanted.
It must have been nice to have that degree of control for your debut feature. You hear stories all the time of producers and companies taking films out of the director’s hands and doing their own version and cut…
Yeah, I was really lucky that for my first experience I had real freedom. The main thing now, on the second one I want to have that much freedom again. Even while shooting, there was a woman who was our script supervisor, called Pat, who had done The Mission and she’d done Elizabeth and she’d done The Killing Fields, real amazing films in really difficult situations. She’d worked with John Boorman and loads of people and she was standing there saying, one that our locations were amazing, the best she had ever seen but that it was also one of the most difficult films she’s done. She also said, “you know what, you’re never going to have this much of freedom ever again” and she should know because she’s been there. What I’m learning is that if you make another film, you might have more money and the more money you have the more you have to justify everything.
On that note what exactly is your next project? I’ve heard things like a ghost story set in Japan, a dark love story set in the UK, and a siege movie in Mexico…
Yeah, that’s it. Those are the three things that I am working on and honestly I haven’t actually decided which one yet, or it hasn’t been decided for me because there are a couple of things I’m waiting to happen. A couple of them are adaptations so it all depends on the book rights and stuff like that so I can’t really say yet. I mean I’ve been working on so many different projects and I’m just hoping that the next few days, something gets sorted out so I can try and get on with it. But I’ve been busy developing quite a few things.
Would one of them be of the rumoured remake of Brighton Rock?
Yes that was one of the projects that I have been sent but again that’s just one of a few projects that I’ve been looking at.
So that won’t be going into pre-production anytime soon then?
No
Would you like to remake it?
It’s a very good opportunity but what I don’t want to do is a remake of the movie. I was sent a script and at the time I hadn’t seen the movie or the book, and so I looked at the story and thought it was amazing, and that it was definitely possible to do a modern adaptation of the book, but I don’t know if I’m going to be the person to do it yet (Laughs). I haven’t decided yet.
Just going back to The Warrior for a second, the film has got a very Western feel to it. Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa must have been big influences for you?
Yeah absolutely, I’m a big fan of Leone, I love Once Upon a Time in the West particularly. I love Westerns, I love that kind of genre, there’s sort of a simplicity to it. Kurosawa, I haven’t seen that many of his movies actually. I love Japanese movies, and I love the rules that come within the genre of Japanese samurai films. And they aren’t far off the samurai of Japan to gangster films in America and I think they are all essentially centred on the same themes. My idea was to take those kind of rules and put them in a new place, put them in India and to tell the story with a slightly new twist. Hopefully the idea was not to copy those people. You know how sometimes you see a movie and you go OK, they have literally copied the music. What hopefully we haven’t done was to parody those great films and filmmakers, and to try to have my own version of the story and direct my kind of way, so hopefully it’s the beginning of a ‘Kapadia’ type of film.
Along with those directors, are then any others that you feel that you have borrowed from at all or really admire?
The main man for me is Hitchcock. I think he is the best kind of teacher, best kind of director to learn from. I’m a big fan of Vertigo and Psycho and so many of his movies, but it’s just the way that he works, and the way that everything for him is in the script. He turns it all out and then he goes off and he shoots it. He worked within the Hollywood studio system with the biggest stars of the day, but he made these films that were really dark and they’ve lasted. The proof is in the pudding, they’ve lasted so long and they’re still brilliant. I saw Psycho a few years ago for the first time at the cinema, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it on a big screen?
No, actually ..
You know what? You can’t judge a Hitchcock film until you’ve seen them on the big screen, because they are amazing. I just think he’s amazing. (Pause). I mean I can name a few films that have really inspired me, Hitchcock is one guy, but in terms of films, there’s another Japanese director called Mizoguchi. He’s another really well known Japanese director, and he made a film called Ugetsu. I love Sam Peckinpah, big fan of Straw Dogs. Obviously Scorsese.
There’s a film by a French director called Robert Bresson, not Luc, Robert, big difference! It’s called A Man Escaped and it’s kind of like . I don’t know what it is . it’s sort of an early new wavy kind of film, but it’s a brilliant film and it’s another film that I saw at college that really inspired me because of its simplicity. He works with non-professional actors, very little actually happens, but so much happens and the story is really told through montage, it’s all told through the cut because he doesn’t want people to act in a way. I saw this film and it blew me away. It’s a brilliant film. Essentially it’s a brilliant prison drama, about a guy breaking out of prison. You know that Clint Eastwood one Escape from Alcatraz?
Yes ..
It’s a bit like that but in a very French kind of way, and I think it’s superb. There’s another guy, a Chinese guy, who I really love and his name is Yimou Zhang, I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. He did a film called Raise the Red Lantern but after that he did a film called The Story of Qiu Ju. That’s the one that I love. It’s a really dead simple story. I suppose I quite like the fairy tales and folk tales and quite simple types of stories but done, hopefully, with an interesting interpretation, and The Story of Qiu Ju is just about a woman who wants an apology for something that has happened to her. The whole story is just so moving, it’s brilliant and it’s also shot in almost a documentary-style in China, so you really can’t see whether they or not they are actors or not. But it’s really, really a beautiful movie. Films like that really really inspire me, but I love all sorts of American cinema and French.
Have you always wanted to be a film director?
No. Actually, I originally wanted to be a cinematographer but I’ve got bad eyesight so I thought, know what? This isn’t going to happen. I can’t see whether the damn thing’s in focus or not! So maybe if they got someone else to do it. I enjoyed working on films. I never really watched movies when I was younger but I worked on a short, really enjoyed it, worked on another one, worked on another one and I never stopped and that was that. Somehow one thing led to another and and one of my mates had started making shorts on a format you’ve never heard of Umatic. Doesn’t really exist anymore, shows how old I am! We just made some stuff and bit by bit people liked what I had done and it gave me the chance to go to college, so I’ve really come the film’s school route.
So what would you say to all these students coming out of college who want to direct movies?
The only way to really learn is by doing it, keep making stuff. You can’t learn filmmaking any other way, you can’t learn it from a book, you can’t learn it from college. The only reason you go to college is to make the movies and by watching other people’s mistakes if you’re lucky. I mean, you work on a film and you realise that someone is doing something wrong, then you go, well look it’s not going to work and everyone goes, look it’s great, but you still know it’s not going to work and then you see the film and it didn’t work. Then you go, yeah I knew that, why didn’t anyone else know that. So just keep doing it, keep writing, read as many books you want to practice the art I suppose. Watch as many movies and then watch them a second time to understand why it worked or why it didn’t work, to learn the structure or the script or the character’s motivation maybe.
When you’re in college everyone says how hard it is to get into the film industry and that you have to be ruthless, but it sounds like you became a director mainly by making good films. Obviously this isn’t as easy as it sounds but it does give hope to the people out there who don’t have the money to go to film school but do have the passion and ability to succeed.
The only thing I would say is that if you want to direct, then the only thing that you have to do is find your style and there are a few ways of doing it. One is you copy someone or something else that is successful, and that will take you a certain way but eventually that style will go out of fashion and then what do you do? So you can always try and copy the last hits, for example everyone trying to do their version of Dogme films or whatever. But there might be a moment where everyone says we’re sick of DV and then what happens and that’s all you’ve learned?. So I would say the best thing is to just make your own films about things that you want to talk about, and to try to find your own style and hopefully to find something that only you can do, that makes you unique to everyone else. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but then they say we need a certain type of movie and that person there is the best one at doing that. So at least you are the best in your little world. At the beginning especially because you’re not going to have money so you’re not going to be able to compete with a lot of the other people. But the main thing you can do is try and be unique.
Look at people like Scorsese, Coppola and Spike Lee, all those people who came out of NYU. I remember, the thing that they learned was to tell something that was personal to you and that, in a way, is the same sort of rules of telling something that makes you special and not what you think everyone else wants. That’s the short term answer, and I think the long term answer is, if you really want to do it, keep working at it and eventually you’ll find something that just really puts your name on the map.
![Interview: Terence Davies on Distant Voices, Still Lives [from the CU Archive]](http://www.close-upfilm.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/terence-davies-150x150.jpg)
