Fans of Asif Kapadia’s acclaimed music documentaries – such as his controversial, Oscar-winning 2011 film about Amy Winehouse, Amy – will be pleased to hear he’s returning to the genre soon with a new project.
Kapadia is known for his forensic, archive-heavy films about global stars including racing driver Ayrton Senna, Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona and Winehouse, but he has veered away from that approach recently. His latest show about tennis superstar Roger Federer’s final days before retirement uses precious little archive material, and when he has reverted to type it has been for streaming series such as Disney+’s Camden and 1971: The Year That Changed Everything on Apple TV+. Not since 2019’s Diego Maradona has he made a full-length movie in his patented style.
In an interview to promote Prime Video series Roger Federer: 12 Final Days, Kapadia revealed to NME that he has a music film in the pipeline that is “100 per cent a lot of archive material, like Amy”.
“It’s about a group – and they’re quite famous,” he teased, after refusing to be drawn on if the artist is “a rock star or pop star or rapper”.
“It’ll be a challenge, a good challenge, an interesting challenge, because it’s a lot of material and it’s gonna take a while to put together,” he said. “I’ve kind of got to a phase [of my career] where I make quite a few things at the same time because they take so long so it may not be the next one. There’s something else that I’m finishing, which is kind of a political film that because of the shit going on in the world, I thought I had to do something about… That will be next up – and then maybe after that will be the music idea.”
12 Final Days, for which Kapadia came on board after most of the material had been shot, tells the story of all-time tennis great Roger Federer’s last days before retirement in 2022. The film has received mixed reviews – with critic Mark Kermode praising it as “a very loving tribute”, while others, such as The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw criticised Kapadia’s seeming unwillingness to go deeper in what he calls an “officially sanctioned corporate promo for the Federer brand.”
Kapadia rejects the idea that Federer had any influence on his documentary. “There was no interference [from Federer] in terms of me making the film,” he said, “and the person I’ve got to know since making the film is the person that you see in the film… The idea was to lean into what [the film] actually is, Which is this small observational doc about this very famous person.”
He added: “I’m pretty sure somewhere down the line there’ll be another version [of Federer’s story on film] and maybe it will be a longer film, and maybe we’ll get into more detail what he really thinks.”
Kapadia does think, however, that there are now fewer opportunities to make the kind of deep-dive profiles of celebrities that he made his name with – and that is why we are seeing more of the carefully-controlled pop portraits such as Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana on Netflix or Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé.
“What has also happened is the pop video market has died,” Kapadia explained. “So people who do music videos now do music docs or feature docs. It’s essentially the same thing. It’s a pop video – but it’s two hours long and you can sell it to a streamer and make a load of money and the audience get what they want.
“I still do what I do, and I’m working on some other stuff which is more similar to what I’ve done in the past. But I also like to challenge myself and do something different like with this new one.”
‘Roger Federer: 12 Final Days’ is streaming on Prime Video now