Asif Kapadia
Asif’s graduate short film The Sheep Thief (made during his time at the Royal College of Art) won the Jury Prize in Cannes and the Grand Prix at the European Short Film Festival in Brest. His first feature as both writer and director of The Warrior was hugely successful both critically and commercially, collecting the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film & the Carl Foreman Award for the Most Promising Newcomer at the 2002 BAFTAs.
In the same season he won the Evening Standard British Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer and the London Film Festival’s Sutherland Trophy.
A first generation Londoner, Asif, who is Hackney born and bred, went to his parents’ homeland of India for the first time when he was 23. He went back the second time to shoot The Sheep Thief.
“The idea of shooting in the grey drizzle of London depresses me.
I love the amazing light of India the people, the faces, the choice of untouched landscapes.”
Though remarkable, making that film proved such a harrowing experience the young filmmaker said “Never Again”. But the experience stayed with him and like childbirth, he managed to forget the pain just enough to conceive a masterpiece! Just three years later came The Warrior, and when Asif talks about directing that film he makes an epic adventure - and mammoth achievement - sound as easy as baking a cake.
“I didn't want to take the easy route and make a small first film; two people in a room didn't interest me. I wanted to push myself a bit more. So I decided to work on the idea with my co-writer, Tim Miller. A year and half later I was standing in the middle of the desert in Rajasthan India, with a crew of 250. It was 47 degrees. We had horses, camels, buffalo, scorpions, armed warriors, 600 extras filling a 500-year-old fort. I looked around me: this was it, my first film.
The idea came about because Tim Miller and Asif shared an interest in magical realism and classic folk and morality tales. One old Japanese folk tale mentioned the young son of a warrior who had fled to escape his lord. The pursuers bought back a head, which the boy pretends to recognise as his father’s so that the father could make his escape. The boy died. They wanted to know was what had happened to bring us to this point. Why did the father run away? What eventually happened to the father?
Together they worked on the story, and set it within The Rajputs, who lived in the deserts and forts of Rajasthan, in the north-west of India, where Asif shot his short film. They wanted it to have a magical strand and shooting in India made the mystical element believable.
Asif wanted to be original. His influences were landscape films, Sergio Leone’s westerns and Japanese films, particularly those of Kenji Mizoguchi and Zhang Yimou's Story Of Qui Ju. He wanted to tell stories visually, with minimal dialogue in distant, strange landscapes.
ASIF’S AWARDS:
THE WARRIOR (2001)
Carl Foreman Award
Most Promising Newcomer
Alexander Korda Award
Best British Film
Shared with: Bertrand Faivre
British Independent Film Awards
Douglas Hickox Award
Nominated BAFTA Film Award
Best Film not in the English Language
Shared with Bertrand Faivre
Dinard British Film Festival
Golden Hitchcock
Evening Standard British Film Awards
Most Promising Newcomer
Nominated European Film Awards
European Discovery of the Year
London Film Festival
Sutherland Trophy
Nominated San Sebastián International Film Festival
Golden Seashell
THE SHEEP THIEF (1997)
Brest European Short Film Festival
European Grand Prix
Melbourne International Film Festival
City of Melbourne Award Best Short Fiction
Tied with Suikerpot, De (1997).
Asif was asked by Sight & Sound magazine in 2002, to select his Top Ten films of all time. These are his choices:
Asif Kapadia: Top Ten
Psycho (Hitchcock)
Raging Bull (Scorsese)
The Godfather
The Godfather Part II (Coppola)
Ugetsu Monogatari (Mizoguchi)
Do the Right Thing (Lee)
Once upon a Time in the West (Leone)
Don't Look Now (Roeg)
The Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa)
The Story of Qiu Ju (Zhang)
Straw Dogs (Peckinpah)
For more on Asif Kapdia see www.kamera.co.uk
