A $100m biopic of the legendary Brazilian Formula One driver Ayrton Senna was supposed to have been made with Antonio Banderas playing Senna. Due to his untimely death the project was shelved and will never now see the light of day. What we can see, however, is Senna, a newly released a feature-length documentary about the man who many consider to be the greatest and most charismatic racing driver who ever lived.
The real story has now been told and it is definitive, thrilling and packed with emotion. Senna’s life was lived in the fast lane, literally. Unseen footage of the young Senna go-karting in Brazil opens the movie, and it ends with the tragic events that unfolded in 1994 at Imola.
There is a saying that is has to be real as you couldn’t make it up, and this definitely applies to Senna’s life and the way that his racing career unfolded. Everything is laid bare here from when people first noticed the glimmer of his genius, his ascent to greatness, the period where he dominated all other, bitter rivalries, dismay and disillusionment and the final, tragic end to a life.
Other factors contribute to this being not just a great motor racing film or a great sports film, but a great piece of cinema full-stop. It helps that Senna himself has the looks and screen presence of a movie idol. His gaze is intense, his focus all-consuming, and the camera simply loves him. Then there is the footage the film uses to construct this most compelling of dramas. Senna’s rise mirrored a period when emerging technology meant that many of his fans, especially in Japan where he really was revered like a deity, had their own cameras. Formula One is obviously also a sport that is well-covered, and the upshot is that the film-makers had almost 5000 hours of footage to sift through. As you’d expect, the in-car stuff is sensational, and the sight of Senna qualifying at Monaco in 1988 – when he was close to two seconds faster than his team-mate Alain Prost and admitted that he’d achieved some kind of transcendental state – is as spookily powerful as ever.
But some of the other material is equally special. Brazilian broadcaster Globo tracked Senna closely even before he made it into F1 in 1984, and his appearance on a 1980s Christmas programme is hilarious. Better still are the scenes culled from FOM’s (Formula One Management) bulging archives, particularly the driver’s briefing in which Senna remonstrates at former FIA President, the pompous Jean-Marie Balestre. There are precious insights not to just into Senna’s world, but the secretive world of F1 itself.
The truth is that even a rough edit of all this would probably have satisfied most racing fans. But what elevates Senna to a different level is that it’s an expertly constructed film. Credit for this must go to the director, the Bafta award-winner Asif Kapadia, producer James Gay-Rees, and writer/producer Manish Pandey. The latter’s screenplay gives the film a genuinely cinematic thrust, and has you marvelling at Senna’s sheer ability, the spiritual dimension he brought to his racing, and his infectious and often infuriating personality. Kapadia, meanwhile, brings his skills as a drama director to bear on what is often very grainy looking archive, and invests the film with a relentless, intoxicating rhythm. There are no talking heads inSenna, just some well-judged voice-over from journalists who were there, as well as key figures like Ron Dennis and Frank Williams. The film is essentially a patch-work quilt of found footage, but an extraordinarily elegant one.
The circumstances of Senna’s demise are as chilling as ever. The feeling that he somehow knew something terrible was going to befall him is inescapable. But in the midst of the tragedy, the film strives for an elegiac note and achieves it. Formula One still misses Ayrton Senna but this is an appropriate memorial.
