SAINT OF NAPLES

AAfter stirring portraits of Formula 1 driver Ayrton Senna and singer Amy Winehouse, Oscar-winning filmmaker ASIF KAPADIA turns his gaze to Argentinian football legend Maradona in his latest documentary, Diego Maradona.

Q. Unlike your earlier two films, this one is about a figure who is alive, someone who still makes headlines. Did the filmmaking process change as a result?

I spoke to him and interviewed him for the film. He talks in a way he has never before and speaks about things that he has never spoken about. People think that because he’s alive, he has had some creative influence on the film, but he has not even seen it.

Q. What made you focus on the Naples chapter of his career?

Maradona’s story is a series of cycles. He goes somewhere, everyone thinks it’s great that he’s here, he does something fantastic and then he gets into a disagreement or an argument, and it all goes bad, so he leaves town and goes somewhere else. He repeats the story on and on. The biggest cycle is in Naples. He has never stayed anywhere else for seven years, never won multiple championships anywhere else [with Napoli], he came close to winning the World Cup twice there [Italy], and his biggest personal problems started there.

Q. You continue juggling between features and documentaries, much like Martin Scorsese.

Scorsese is one of the reasons I started doing it. He’s a big hero and he’s always doing it. In fact, he saw the film and really liked it. I thought this is the nearest I will come to doing a Scorsese-type thing. Maradona is a guy from the streets who became a saint of sorts in Naples. The saint of Naples is Gennaro, and if you see Mean Streets, there’s a scene of the feast of St Gennaro.

Any Indian personality whose life you’d like to explore?

The nearest to an Indian person that comes to me is Imran Khan (laughs). ■

—with Suhani Singh

“PEOPLE THINK AS HE’S ALIVE, MARADONA’S INFLUENCED THE FILM, BUT HE HASN’T SEEN IT”