Quotes from Asif Kapadia

On 'Senna,' it got to the point where there was so much footage that our first editor had the wild suggestion that we only use the archive.

I never know going in if I've even got a movie to make. Once you start making a film, you hope there's going to be enough material! My job as a director is always to push for more.

We were working on 'Senna' for a long time before we were fully financed, so we didn't actually have an editor for a while.

'Do the Right Thing' has been a big influence on me. I saw it when it first came out in 1989. I was about 18, and it blew me away on many levels - I had never seen anything like it before.

After Newport, I worked in television for a while, and then I went to The Royal College Of Art and did a master's degree. I really did study quite a lot!

I used to live in Pillgwenlly, and there was this old Italian pizzeria that used to be there with a really amazing character who ran it.

Why make a movie about Ayrton Senna? Someone who drove around in circles at 200mph in a car that looked like a giant cigarette packet? Why would anyone who isn't already a fan of Formula 1 care?

Weirdly enough, I live in London - was born there and have lived there all my life - but I hadn't made a film in London for a long time. I hadn't found the right subject. I liked going away, to some far flung place.

You don't have to be someone who likes walking a tightrope across the Twin Towers to watch 'Man On Wire.'

Real life is far more complicated than fiction.

I never realised 'The Return' would take so long to make - it was a very tough 'political experience,' and the post production in L.A. seemed to go on forever.

When I was given the opportunity to direct 'Senna,' I decided the film had to work for audiences who disliked sport or had never seen a Formula One race in their lives. It had to thrill and emotionally engage people who had never heard of Ayrton Senna.

While still a young student at film school, I was lucky enough to get a golden ticket to a Martin Scorsese master class at BAFTA in Piccadilly: fancy, but technically still 'the flicks'.

People have always been recording what's going on around them in one form or another.

I lived in Camden, Primrose Hill and Kentish Town for 10 years.

In a film called 'Senna,' the clue is in the title, and we have a Brazilian badge on our sleeve as we were making it. We were making it from Senna's point of view, with Senna narrating it.

As a filmmaker, you complete a film you have spent years obsessively making, and you know the release prints will never look quite the same; prints get scratched and dirty.

The worst thing ever for me is go see a movie, and the next day I go, 'What did I do last night? I have no memory of this $300 million movie I watched because I felt nothing.'

I love telling stories with images. But I think there's more to just saying a movie is great visually.

My background is from India, and I always get asked, 'When are you going to do an Indian film, a musical or Bollywood film?'

The thing people don't get about Indian films is that the songs are the story.

My background is Indian, so I believe in a spiritual idea that there is another level, another layer or layers, if you will, above us. I believe that there are elements that allow things to be drawn together, a sort of energy.

The big thing for me is to make films that you feel, whether you feel happy, whether you feel sad, whether you feel sick; it's to make the audience feel so that the next day they remember what they saw.

Directing can be very lonely and quite intimidating.