The Warrior Watch a scene from Asif's 2001 debut.

At first glance writer-director Asif Kapadia looks like an overnight success story. He made a BAFTA-winning feature debut with The Warrior in 2001, but this was the culmination of many years' work. Here Kapadia explains how he rose through the ranks from production runner and why he went to Hollywood to make The Return...



"I studied graphic design originally. I used to like drawing and I was quite into technical drawing. I was always interested in the visual medium, but I thought I was going to be an architect or something like that, but it's quite a lonely job. I came to a point where I decided I wasn't cut out for this and it was purely by chance that someone asked me to help them out. They asked if I could turn up at this certain place at a certain time – me and a friend called Paul Day [now a TV producer] – and the two of us were asked to go and help out on a student film. All we had to do was carry boxes around.

We were production runners, but for some reason we found it to be the most exciting thing in the universe – just carrying these boxes in and out of the van in Harrow in the pouring rain and the cold and the wind. Eventually they asked if I could 'Put up that gel' and 'Can you move that light' and 'Hold the boom'. Bit by bit we just started doing more and more on the film. I think the crew found us to be quite enthusiastic and useful. We were about 17- or 18-years-old at the time. A few weeks later the camerawoman on that film was going to be shooting her film in Cornwall, so she said, 'You guys have been really great. Will you come down to Cornwall? I'll pay for your ticket and put you up.

Honestly, we were just city boys from North London – Paul was from Tottenham and I'm from Hackney – and we'd really not been out of London much. Before we knew it, we were travelling to Cornwall on a train, arriving in the middle of the night. It was just a very, very exciting thing. Once we were asked to do one film, we were asked to do another and we just kept getting asked."



"After Cornwall my friend and I decided we wanted to make films and we changed our course. We were doing a media course and we shifted modules from graphic design to film and video. It was quite sudden, but we immediately fell in love with the filmmaking process. Paul became my producer and I was the writer and director. Following that we went to university together and that's when we made our first proper short film, called Indian Tales (1994). It won prizes in America and a few other places and still gets shown occasionally. Paul managed to raise the money for the film and it was sold to TV and in quite a few countries around the world. We actually made our money back on that short film.

We were studying at Newport Film School and I found that the only way for me to make films – because you need people and you need equipment – was that I had to be a student. I studied as much as I could in order to make shorts and just keep making them and keep working on films, full stop. That was my original passion – just being on set and working for other people, and at the same time making my own films. Bit by bit, they became more successful and more important and as soon as I started writing, it became very difficult to work on other peoples' films.

Those experiences mean I know what each job entails and I know what's possible and what isn't, because it can be quite scary, all that equipment. It still is intimidating to walk out on set and when you're doing a feature film, what I really find quite strange is that everybody has a department on the film set apart from the director. You know, you have a huge camera department, a sound department and a design department, and just this one director person who might have an assistant if they're lucky. You have an AD but really the AD is linked to production – just making sure you get everything done on time. It's a peculiar thing. Directing can be very lonely and quite intimidating."

"After Newport I worked in television for a while and then I went to The Royal College Of Art and did a Masters degree. I really did study quite a lot! I knew there was a type of filmmaking that I was really interested in which was very visual, on a big frame with very little dialogue. During that Masters degree I worked on trying to make my own style of film. I made three films there which all had very little, if any, dialogue in them. The final graduation film was called The Sheep Thief (1997), which I shot in India. It won a prize at Cannes, and quite a few awards around the world, so that was the film that gave me my first real step on the ladder.

People in the industry saw the film, liked it and came up to me and asked, 'What do you want to do next?' A few years later I was co-writing a script for a film set in India. People made jokes that I was going to make a Bollywood film but my style is very European. Of course I'd already worked in India and shown people what I could do with that cinematically. That's what helped me get The Warrior made.

There were three people in the industry in London - Paul Webster, who used to be at Miramax; Jim Wilson, who used to be at Fox Searchlight; and Eleanor Dey who used to work at the BBC - these three people really liked the short film and were very positive about me and it just happened that they all ended up at Channel 4. You need a hell of a lot of luck to make films. You need to work hard and have the works to show, but you've also got to get lucky. I just happened to have my script for The Warrior ready when all these people were working at Channel 4. That's how I got the financing."

"At the beginning of shooting The Warrior I forgot what I liked. I remember the first day of shooting where I stood there thinking, 'I can't remember what kind of lenses I like... do I want wide lenses, long lenses?' Suddenly I forgot everything. Invariably that's what happens until you're successful enough to become prolific – that means being able to write very fast or have other people writing screenplays for you. I don't think I'd directed anything for five years when I came to shooting The Warrior, so I just felt like I had forgotten how to direct. During the process of making that film I reminded myself, 'Oh yeah, that's what I like. That's what I don't like.' And by the end of it, you're really good. Tired, but really good. Then of course it ends and it might be another five years before you get a chance to make another one."



"It was a very political experience making a studio film in America [2006's The Return, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar]. It's not as simple as saying, 'I like this therefore I am going to do this.' It's politics. It's like if someone else above you wants something else, whether it's right or wrong, they will get their way. It becomes a strange situation where you're saying, 'OK. I'll give you that if you give me this.' But you cannot make films like that. To be brutally honest, it was a very difficult experience and, for me, not the way I want to make films.

Films really need to have one voice, and that's the voice of the director. Studio films are not made like that and sometimes they can be hugely successful and work, but a lot of the time, things just get very messy and muddy. And that's what happened on that film. I was happy to escape from that and go into making my own film [Far North], which I've written and directed, and people trusted me to make the way I wanted to make it."

"The challenge with The Return was to see what it would be like to make a film that I didn't write, because I'm not prolific. It's taken me five years to make two movies. I'm quite a slow writer so it's taken a long time to get this project [Far North] together. In Europe we don't have a lot of money. We've got a lot of projects and a lot of directors, but we don't have enough money. In America they have more than enough money, but you're not given the creative freedom, so it's really about trying to find that balance. I'm still learning and I thought working in America would be an interesting challenge, and it was. And I have learned a lot. You know, the directors I really respect make a lot of personal films as well as films that are meant to be more commercial. I wanted to try something new, basically, and you might not always pull it off but at least you learn something."



"I'm bothered about how the film looks. For me, film is a very visual medium. I'm not the sort of person who will make a film that is really dialogue heavy. I don't want to see theatre on the big screen, or a radio play. The challenge is always about how to make the film really cinematic and visual. I suppose the obsession then is travelling to the ends of the world to try and find places to set the films. There's a much easier way to make movies, but I really like the challenge. I try to perfect every frame so that everything looks right.

When I was making The Warrior in India I spent a hell of a lot of time travelling, coming back and rewriting, going back to India, coming back here and rewriting. The new film Far North is shot in the Arctic so I spent a lot of time in the North Pole on boats and ships and travelling across glaciers on snowmobiles, deciding how we were going to shoot it."

"I love being on the set, shooting. It's very nerve-wracking and very tense and very tiring, but for me it's the best part. There's one other moment that I think is really special: when you're finishing a film off and you put the first bit of music to it. It's a really beautiful moment because you know what the film is. The toughest part is raising the finance, when you're going out there and everybody's telling you that your film is not commercial. It's a real battle. The other tough part can be when you've finished a movie and it could just potentially sit on a shelf if you don't get distribution. Again you have to go out and try and get someone to buy it."



"If people don't like your short film, go make another one! Keep making films. I know a lot of people who feel they are perfectionists and they never finish a project because they feel they can do better. I think that's a really dangerous game to get into. One of the reasons I really loved film school was that it gave me deadlines. At some point I had to finish the film and show it to people, even if I didn't think it was ready. Then I had to start the next one. The danger when you're out of that situation is that you never have a deadline and you can just carry on forever writing the script, or researching, or shooting. Set yourself deadlines."



"One of my tutors is a screenwriter and producer - Tony Grisoni - and he was one of my writing tutors at university and right from the very beginning he really pushed me to write. He's a good friend and someone I show all my scripts and films to. Then there are people like Zhang Yimou. Right now he's doing these big action films, but I really loved Raise The Red Lantern (1991) and The Story Of Qiu Ju (1992). Gong Li plays this pregnant wife and the whole film revolves around her wanting this apology for something that happened to her husband, and it's just an amazing film. His films are very cinematic and very simple – kind of fairytales and folk tales, and that's the kind of movie I'm interested in making. There's a film called Cyclo (1995), which is French-Vietnamese. For me, when I saw that film a lightbulb went off in my head and changed my life. The director Anh Hung Tran is French, he lives in Paris but he's from a Vietnamese background. Seeing that, I realised as an English guy from an Asian background, I wanted to shoot in India. That film also uses non-actors and it really gave me the idea to go and make The Sheep Thief, which led to The Warrior."

"Like everyone of my generation I also have to say Martin Scorsese. I haven't necessarily been making films like him, but I've been lucky enough to meet him on a few occasions and he's seen my films and been really positive. He saw The Sheep Thief and liked it and got in touch. Then he saw The Warrior and called me up and said how much he liked that too. When Martin Scorsese calls you on your mobile – that's the dream!"

Stella Papamichael | Published 04 July 07

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