Asif Kapadia

“I'm a sport fan. So, I have always watched everything, and I used to watch racing. Formula One was always on. The genius about it is that it's on at lunchtime on a Sunday.”

“For me, 'Amy' is a very dark film about love.”

“'Amy' is somewhere in the middle of authorized and unauthorized.”

“The worst thing ever for me is go see a movie, and the next day I go, 'What did I do last night? I have no memory of this $300 million movie I watched because I felt nothing.'”

“A lot of the time when I'm working, I'm abroad.”

“I never realised 'The Return' would take so long to make - it was a very tough 'political experience,' and the post production in L.A. seemed to go on forever.”

“The subjects have to come with questions for me. I don't make films where I'm a massive fan.”

“I wanted to study film at an art school - I loved the idea of being surrounded by designers and artists. We were encouraged to be experimental.”

“The big thing for me is to make films that you feel, whether you feel happy, whether you feel sad, whether you feel sick; it's to make the audience feel so that the next day they remember what they saw.”

“While still a young student at film school, I was lucky enough to get a golden ticket to a Martin Scorsese master class at BAFTA in Piccadilly: fancy, but technically still 'the flicks'.”

“It's always great to be able to go to a premiere with the actors there.”

“You don't have to be someone who likes walking a tightrope across the Twin Towers to watch 'Man On Wire.'”

“I wanted to make a film that wouldn't just appeal to Formula One fans. That's what the great sports documentaries do - 'Hoop Dreams,' 'When We Were Kings' - they're human dramas first, sport second, if at all.”

“We were working on 'Senna' for a long time before we were fully financed, so we didn't actually have an editor for a while.”

“My team and I used the actual footage to create a three-act story of the life of Ayrton Senna. There are no talking heads and no voiceover. Senna narrates his own epic, dramatic, thrilling journey.”

“As a kid, I thought movies were boring. My parents would hire VHS recorders for the weekend and watch Bollywood movies. I'd get bored and go out to Stoke Newington common to play football.”

“I don't really rely on watching video monitors. They put you at a certain distance from your actors, and it makes me feel less a part of what's really happening in the scene.”

“We spent four days filming in a helicopter. I had never seen London from that viewpoint - you get a sense of how big it is and how easy it is to get lost. There was one day when we couldn't find Brick Lane: we spent 25 minutes looking and then realised it was directly below us.”

“I'm an ordinary Hackney boy, and I can talk to people.”

“You can't stop people watching on mobiles, but I hope the old fashioned idea of sitting in a dark room with a big screen with a group of strangers lives on forever.”