Senna The Making of a Screen Idol

He is known to motor radng fans everywhere, but thanks to the efforts of British film-makers, cinema-goers worldwide are now discovering the Ayrton Senna story
By Adam Cooper

Much touted by those who have been lucky enough to see it, the eagerlyawaited Senna movie finally makes it into UK cinemas on June 3. And the cinema is the place to see it — don’t wait for the DVD. And don’t confuse it with the typical TV documentary that might pop up on BBC2 or the History Channel.

Senna is a feature film that happens to have a non-fiction subject matter. It’s also a bona fide work of art, and stands to be judged as a major movie-going experience in its own right. It’s the first documentary from the UK’s top film production company and was made by a team of people well versed in fictional movies, who know how to tell a story — and make it appeal to people with little or no interest in motor racing.

That hasn’t made the result of any less relevance to folk who read this magazine, and who have a passion for Formula 1 history. You may know how the story is going to end, but the emotional roller coaster of a journey that is Senna is well worth taking.

Many people played a role in getting Senna to the screen, but the real driving force was 43-year-old British screenwriter and executive producer Manish Pandey. A qualified doctor, he’s also an F1 fan to his very core, and his infectious enthusiasm for his subject matter shines through. Spend a few minutes in his company and you can understand how he helped to convince the likes of Bernie Ecclestone to come on board.

Pandey’s earliest F1 memory is of James Hunt winning the title at Fuji in 1976. His passion for the sport developed through the turbo era. “I was just really, really hooked,” he says. “I had to get special permission from my mum to watch Grand Prix. It was always 10.30pm on a Sunday night and I was knackered on Monday morning at school! The obsession was always there. I’ve missed six live races since I was 13.”

He was in his mid-teens when Ayrton Senna arrived on the F1 scene: “I remember watching Monaco 1984 like it was yesterday. There was this ugly white car crossing the line in front, and Murray Walker saying he’s come second, because the result will be from the lap before.

“Then before the 1985 season Murray did a BBC special about the cars and drivers for that year. Suddenly there was Senna, in black, inspecting that Lotus. And Murray said something I’ve never forgotten — ‘if there is a man who can win the World Championship in his first season in a competitive car, it’s this man’. It was those words from Murray, my oracle, and the way Senna was examining the car. That was it. I just thought, ‘You’re the man!’

“Suddenly I had a proper hero. I loved everything about Senna. I learned about how determined he was, how passionate he was, how ruthless he was. I found every one of those characteristics more attractive, not less…”

Pandey was a rare dedicated Senna follower at a time when fanatical Mansell-mania dominated every British GP weekend.

“For me it was a perfect storm. You’ve got this great guy, you admire him so much, and he’s the bete noire of everyone you don’t like. And the more ignorant they are, the more you feel justified in liking this guy.”

Pandey was probably one of the few spectators to be disappointed when Senna retired from the 1992 British Grand Prix. Watching from the Motor Sport hospitality unit — a friend in advertising had somehow blagged two tickets — he saw Ayrton striding into the pit entry after the race.

“He walked straight past me, and I was a few feet above him. These fans were jeering and booing him, and he just ignored it. He looked at me and I looked at him, and I shrugged. He gave me this slightly quizzical look and carried on walking. That was the closest I ever came to my hero…”

After school Pandey had some ambitions to get involved in motor racing, and he even landed a mechanical engineering place at Bristol University, having impressed the interviewer with his knowledge of F1. However, during his gap year he changed direction and ended up following a family tradition by studying medicine at Cambridge.

Specialising in orthopaedics, he still takes lower limb and back clinics. But in 2002 he went part-time to focus on another passion — the film business. He has written several romantic comedies, forging a relationship with ‘Brit flick’ flag-waver Working Title, whose hits have included Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Billy Elliot, Love Actually and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, as well as many US-based Coen Brothers films.

Until Senna, none of his own scripts had actually made it to the screen. The closest he came was with an Indian version of Pride and Prejudice, which was pre-empted when someone else had a similar idea: “That nuked my work, but the woman I’d developed the script with at Working Title became my wife!”

The Senna story did not start with obsessive fan Pandey, but with someone who had no interest in the sport. James Gay-Rees took little notice when his father, then an account manager for John Player Special, told him stories about the Lotus team’s Brazilian driver.

By 2004 Gay-Rees was a successful film producer pitching ideas to Working Title. Newspaper articles about the 10th anniversary of Imola caught his eye and he floated the idea of a documentary about the death of Senna. Working Title co-chairman Eric Fellner — a Ferrari enthusiast who counts Lord March and Johnny Dumfries as pals — could immediately see the potential. That’s when Pandey came in.

“My wife was head of development at Working Title at the time, and she’d made a film with James many years earlier. She said if you want to make a film about Senna you should talk to my husband, because he really knows about him.

“So I met James in October 2004. I said you can’t just make a film about the death of Senna. It misses the point of him. If you really knew what this guy was in life, you’d see it. If you want to do something do his life and death.

“I even had in my mind what the three acts would be — his ascent to the World Championship, his struggle, which only begins when he becomes World Champion, and then his death, which is the whole third act. James said ‘fantastic — can you write something?’ ”

A month later Pandey delivered a 10-page treatment, and the project was on its way. However, it would take fully six years for the finished film to make the screen. The process proved to be as drawn out and exacting as putting together a major blockbuster, and there were many hurdles to overcome — not least getting the support of the Senna family.

In June 2005 Pandey and Gay-Rees had a positive meeting in London with Celso Lemos, commercial head of the Senna Foundation, who was constantly fielding proposals for media projects. Lemos realised that this one was different, but as he reminded the would-be biographers, the person who mattered was Ayrt on’s sister, Viviane. It wasn’t until March 2006 that they were able to pin her down in Sao Paulo, where Pandey made a 40-minute audio-visual presentation.

“At the end of it she got up,” he recalls. “I’d known her for 41 minutes by then, and she just said to me, ‘You really knew my brother.’ I had this incredible shiver down my spine when she said that. The closest I’d been to him was four feet away at Silverstone once. She just felt I’d got the essence of the man.”

There was one more bridge to cross — without permission from Ecclestone to use official race footage, there could be no film. The team met him in London in May 2006.

“Viviane had contacted Bernie saying, ‘These guys are going to need archive, would you meet with them?’ The next thing we knew we were at Princes Gate with Ian Holmes, Bernie’s media rights person and a fantastic guy. We had a long chat with him, and Bernie came in. We had a 17-minute meeting. He didn’t sit down but he was very animated and talked a lot. At the end he said ‘We’ll see what we can do.’ We knew we had the deal then.”

It would be a couple of years before contract issues were finalised with the Senna Foundation and Bernie. As time dragged on original director Kevin MacDonald — who made acclaimed mountaineering documentary Touching the Void — dropped out. In February 2007 Pandey and Gay-Rees found a worthy replacement in BAFTA winner Asif Kapadia, who brought a new artistic dimension to the project.

Still awaiting access to the official F1 archive, and keen to get going, Pandey and Kapadia made a prototype 10-minute version of the film using home videos and YouTube clips. It helped to convince Working Title’s parent company Universal to provisionally green-light the film, pending contracts.

More importantly, it gave Kapadia the idea that the full-length film could be made with only original footage and without either talking heads or a narrator. Instead Senna would tell the story himself, backed by soundbites from unseen interviewees. In filmmaking terms, it was a bold step.

“It’s super-rare,” says Pandey. “Normally if people have all archive, they have a narrator, and we didn’t even do that. We made it so hard for ourselves…”

It wasn’t until March 2009 that contracts were signed and the small production team — including editor Gregers Sall, another key player — could really push ahead. They had sourced clips from Brazil, Japan and Europe, including a 1993 BBC documentary series about McLaren. But the key was unprecedented access to Ecclestone’s TV vaults at Biggin Hill.

It wasn’t just a question of Bernie sanctioning use of familiar action shots of particular races. Four or five guys spent a month in the archive trawling through tapes, finding priceless hours of pit and paddock footage that had never been seen. It would generate some of the most arresting scenes in the movie, such as FIA driver briefings, or the preoccupied Senna in the Williams garage during the Imola weekend. There was plenty of footage of former FIA president Jean-Marie Balestre, who emerges as the pantomime villain as the story unfolds.

None of it would have worked without the co-operation of the likes of Frank Williams, Professor Sid Watkins, Alain Prost and Ron Dennis, all of whom were happy to speak. Insight from such as journalist Richard Williams and former ESPN commentator John Bisignano helps to keep the story flowing.

“What really made it gel were the interviews. Who is going to tell the story of 1989 better than the sister who describes him coming home dejected, and Ron describing how he had to come back [in 19901 to fight the dark forces? The film wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t have those interviews.

“I’d find some great lines, we’d try them, and they’d be crap. Then suddenly something would come in, I’d put it in, change it round, they’d cut it, and it would be great, it worked. It was an amazing process.”

The team received an unexpected bonus when top Brazilian soundtrack composer Antonio Pinto got in touch and volunteered to provide the music. Pandey says he was tearful when he first heard what was to become the main theme: “He’d never seen a frame of the film, but from his emotional memory of Ayrton, he wrote that music. It’s just impossible to explain how music works in these things.”

The first cut of the film came in at five hours, and chopping it down to a more manageable and commercial 104 minutes was a painful process. Inevitably some of the story elements were sacrificed, such as Donington ’93. Pandey admits that “we could have been fairer on Alain. We should have got ’89 more right than we did”. Also missing, simply because time ran out, is any interview with Gerhard Berger.

“The two people who really needed to sign off on it were Ron, because we needed his release, and Viviane. In May 2010 we showed it to Ron. He’d seen a previous cut when he was in a rush, and he left straight away. When he came back the second time it was a very different Ron. He cried a little bit through the film, and then he cried for a long time after we finished.

“What is important to remember is that he was there. These two-dimensional experiences for us are highly evocative three-dimensional experiences for Ron, for Viviane.”

The Senna family saw the final version in a specially rented cinema in Cannes, just before the Monaco GP: “Viviane said, ‘Manish, you guys did it. You captured the genius and the humanity.’ And she shrugged. I just can’t tell you how we felt. It was an incredible sigh of relief in that moment — the tension of the world falling off our shoulders.”

A complete and officially approved film was not the end of the story, however. Even with the backing of Universal, formulating a worldwide release campaign was not the work of a moment. The film first emerged in Japan and Brazil late last year, Senna-friendly markets which also happened to have conveniently timed Grands Prix. Pandey regrets that it has taken until now to get it out in the UK.

“I feel an unspeakable amount of guilt that this film has come to the UK six months after the rest of the world. It obviously deserved to go to Brazil, and the GP timing was great. But we should have been out here. Every Tweet I’ve read, every comment on Facebook, has been heartbreaking. He only raced for British teams, and I would argue that British fans are just about the most literate and learned racing fans.

“The film is coming home. We’ve got great hopes for it here. It would be lovely if a younger demographic saw it, maybe a Lewis Hamilton fan who knows nothing about his hero.”

Senna attracted huge plaudits when shown at the Sundance Festival in Utah, winning the prestigious audience award in the foreign documentary category. On the influential International Movie Database website voters rate it at 8.8/10.0 — the best mark for a documentary ever, and beaten only by seven films in history, including The Godfather and Schindler’s List.

“The people who score the film most highly are American women. The Americans bring something to it which we never could, in that they don’t know who he was. So they watch it as a movie, they have no baggage at all.”

Some viewers genuinely have no idea what’s coming in Imola: “It’s about a young man, he’s hard-working, he struggles all his life, he achieves super heights, he’s immensely wealthy, he’s God-fearing — and we kill him! That’s not the Hollywood paradigm at any level…”

So what next for Senna? Already on sale in some countries, the DVD includes an extra 50 minutes of talking heads, which can be viewed separately or inserted at intervals into the film.

Then there’s the award season and, just possibly, a shot at an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. Inevitably the category is dominated by worthy political or socioeconomic themes, although a sporting subject triumphed in 1996 in the form of Muhammad Ali film When We Were Kings.

Senna would have to beat hundreds of other films just to get a nomination. But it’s not impossible — Gay-Rees managed it this year as producer of Exit Through the Gift Shop, the first film from artist Banksy.

“Let’s see what the Academy thinks of it,” says Pandey. “It’s very tough, America. Having said that, Sundance means we’re at least on the map, so it won’t be a complete unknown to people. You never know!”