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Ayrton Senna: The F1 Fanatic Quiz | F1 Fanatic Quiz

Keith Collantine — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 08:54:16 +0000

As the film Senna makes it debut in the USA, what better subject to feature in the latest F1 Fanatic Quiz?

Tackle these 20 questions on Ayrton Senna and see how you fare against other F1 Fanatics:

Ayrton Senna quiz

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F1 Fanatic Quizzes guide

Compare your score in all the other quizzes so far and take more quizzes here:

If you don’t already have one, you will need an F1 Fanatic account to participate in the quizzes. Details on how to get one can be found here:

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The Making of Senna part 9: The response in Brazil | Interview

Keith Collantine — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 08:19:05 +0000

Ayrton Senna, Williams, Interlagos, 1994

One scene in Senna which is received with laughter by most audiences gets a very different reaction when shown in Brazil.

Why does one scene get two contrasting reactions?

The film’s writer Manish Pandey explained some of the surprising responses to the film in Senna’s home country.

“I should have kissed him for ’94″

One of the more amusing moments in Senna sees him on stage in a Brazilian children’s television show. He is smothered with kisses – and bright red lipstick – by the host Xuxa Meneghel.

But while this scene is viewed as comedy by many – including the filmmakers – in Brazil it carries more sombre undertones, as Pandey explains:

“Watching that in Sao Paulo, it was one of the darkest moments of the film.

“It just shows you, [what happens] when you’re a bunch of foreigners and you make a film about somebody you never really knew.

“We turn up and Asif [Kapadia, director] and James [Gay-Rees, executive producer] and I watched the film at the premiere in a cinema full of Brazilians for the first time.

“Normally, when you watch it, you know where the funny moments are – like Alain Prost asking if they can be tied on points.

“When the Xuxa thing happens, everyone in England laughs: you’ve got this big world champion dancing badly with lipstick all over his face.

“What we didn’t realise is that in Brazil there’s a big myth about the number of times she kisses him. When she stops, she stops at 1993.

“It never occurred to me, it never occurred to Asif, it never occurred to James, it never occurred to anybody. We were laughing at it. She shook our hands at the end of the film and she was crying.

“And the next day in the Brazilian press she said ‘I should have kissed him for ’94′”.

The Piquet rivalry

Ayrton Senna, Nelson Piquet, Jacarepagua, 1986

The critical reaction to the film in Brazil was also quite different: “They really wanted more of the Senna-[Nelson] Piquet rivalry, because our film is centred around Senna and Prost”.

Pandey contrasts Senna’s view of being Brazilian, given in an interview on a programme called Roda Viva, with Piquet’s:

“He clearly felt that he was Brazilian, whereas Piquet wasn’t. He clearly felt that he’d made this absolutely conscious decision to get on a plane after every race [to return home].

“Ron Dennis told us much the same thing that, at McLaren, even if they were travelling two days to be in Brazil for one, he just needed to do that.

“Whereas Piquet, as he says, lived in Italy, his friends are Italian and he’s got very few Brazilians around him. Nelson Piquet’s name was Piquet Souto Maior and he hid the Souto Maior part because he didn’t want his mother to know he was motor racing.

“He’s a great guy, a funny guy, but he was in some ways an extremely different human being to [Ayrton] Senna. I think the Brazilians loved that playboy image in the beginning but then they found something a bit more earnest. The thing about Senna is, if you’re going to market the two, he’s probably the easier one to, he’s a bit more wholesome.

Ayrton Senna’s F1 career
in pictures

“But we couldn’t get that into it, and it’s a criticism in Brazil – they just feel, how can you talk about Senna without talking about Piquet. And that’s absolutely fair”.

But Pandey was less interested in another aspect of the story there was much appetite for in Brazil:

“I think the Brazilians also – because they’ve got quite an active tabloid press – they wanted to know why we hadn’t gone into all his girlfriends. And our reaction to that was, well, how would you do it? Do you cut away from a race to a headline in a newspaper?

“Weirdly, I think we were desperately faithful. Because he does come across as a guy for whom, really, motor racing was it. Those girls were interchangeable and that’s the truth of it.

“In the context of a guy who gave his all to become a motor racing driver, I think women, not matter how important they were to him in real life, could only ever have been incidental to him in the film”.

This is the concluding part of “The Making of Senna”. You can find all nine parts of the series here.

See the official website for more information on the film and the official Facebook page for a list of cinemas that are showing it.

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The Making of Senna part 8: The Death of Ayrton Senna | Interview

Keith Collantine — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 10:13:14 +0000

1994: San Marino Grand Prix

When it came to composing the scenes of Ayrton Senna’s death, the filmmakers had a clear idea what they were trying to do – and what they were keen to avoid.

The film’s writer Manish Pandey explained: “We had certain rules. We were not going to move anything from one date to another. It’s like that all the way through the film but at Imola we were really rigorous about it”.

He stresses their first priority was to “tell the truth” and “leave as many opinions as you can out of it until you’re out of Imola”.

Blame

“We always got this slight sense from Williams of ‘are you trying to do this investigative thing on what killed Ayrton Senna?’”

He makes it clear were “absolutely not interested” in doing an investigative piece:

“He died because of bad luck, a combination of circumstances which were terrible.

“We were very clear on [this] fact. I’m not an engineer, nobody’s apportioning blame, but what we needed to do was at the same time give the audience a range of options as to what might have gone wrong.

“The only thing that we felt adamant about – and it was good because Richard Williams felt the same way, Ron Dennis felt the same way – was that it wasn’t a driver error. That was the only thing we wanted to make completely clear. He did not go into, basically, a left-handed kink and make some kind of mistake.

“I remember after he died some of the rubbish rumours going around: ‘he was holding his breath’, ‘he passed out’”.

A “cursed weekend”

Pandey described the events of Imola in 1994 as a “cursed weekend”.

“That’s the only explanation I have for it. I’ve missed four races since I was 13 years old and I’ve never seen, and I hope I never will see, anything like that.

“I’ve been watching some old footage of the fifties recently and the closest thing to Imola, for me, is Mike Hawthorn’s massive accident at Le Mans in ’55. I find that impossible to watch”.

The team were also quick to rebuff any questions about how much detail Senna’s death would be shown in:

“The other thing – which I could look Bernie and the family in the eye about and say was we are not going to do anything graphic around the death. No way.

“First of all the footage doesn’t exist. Second, if you tried to give it to me I’d shove it back in your face, or down your throat.

“That’s not what this was about either: here, come and have a gawp. No way.

“This was the death of somebody that we, in the last 80 minutes, came to understand and came to love. And it’s sad enough that he’s going to die and you’re going to see the aftermath of that: what his death meant to Brazilians, his family, to people who weren’t his family.

“We were absolutely adamant that we were not going to make it graphic.

“It’s one of the few mercies, I think, that no-one had a camera on the inside of the corner. Tamburello is a long shot, so you don’t have to see anything”.

“He knew these things could happen”

At the same time, they were aware that presenting F1 as being anything other than a potentially dangerous sport would be misleading.

Pandey said: “Formula 1 is dangerous. Things happen. Senna knew that when he went into a car for the first time, and he knew that when he went into a car for the last time.

“He had some big accidents: he had the Mexico ’91 accident which we show in the film, he had one a week later at Hockenheim which was worse: the car was thrown five metres into the air because of a tyre failure at the first chicane.

“So he knew these things could happen”.

“I felt his soul had departed”

Part of the voiceover is supplied by Professor Sid Watkins, the neurosurgeon who spent over two-and-a-half decades as the FIA safety and medical delegate. A close friend of Senna’s, it was Watkins who tended to Senna immediately after the crash.

Pandey said that without his input the death scene would have been handled differently:

“If we hadn’t had Sid Watkins’ words, we wouldn’t have shown [the resuscitation]. But Prof makes that human. When he saw that for the first time he cried.

“He’s 80 years old, and he’s seen some stuff – he’s a neurosurgeon, he’s seen head injuries. But just hearing the emotion in his voice and understanding that it’s such a deep loss but he had to be a doctor in that situation”.

“We used to have the official announcement – the guy who tells you: ‘I’ve just received an announcement from Maggiore hospital: Roland Ratzenberger has succumbed’ – we had him, and we felt it was just too much.

“Once Prof has said: ‘I’m not religious, but I felt his spirit had departed’, you didn’t need to know any more”.

Pandey concludes:

“We knew we’d have footage, we knew we could have gone a graphic way with this, we knew we could have gone a ‘pointing fingers’ way with this, but all of that would have been to the absolute detriment of Senna, and all the great people who helped us.

“Because the truth was, it was just bad, bad luck. And that’s the story we tell”.

The concluding part of “The Making of Senna” will be published tomorrow.

To ensure you don’t miss an instalment subscribe to F1 Fanatic for free via RSS, Twitter or our email subscription service. Click here for more information.

See the official website for more information on the film and the official Facebook page for a list of cinemas that are showing it.

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The Making of Senna part 7: Imola 1994 | Interview

Keith Collantine — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 16:34:16 +0000

Ayrton Senna, Williams, Imola, 1994

The infamous events of the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix means the majority of people who watch Senna will do so knowing how it ends.

So how were the film’s producers to handle the unavoidably tragic outcome of the film?

There were differing views on how best to do it, as writer Manish Pandey explained:

“It was the hardest, hardest part of the film to make. Everyone knows the end of this film.

“One of the things that I felt very strongly about – and James [Gay-Rees, executive producer] did, too – was that no matter who came on this journey we wanted you to forget that he died.

“I remember arguing with a few people who said, ‘well, that’s bollocks – everyone knows he died so we should start the film with it’.

“But I think you’re immediately on the back foot then. You’re going to go see this film and through every single thing that you see you’re thinking ‘he’s going to die’.

“It won’t leave you – certainly not for 100 minutes”.

He described the events of the weekend as “powerful and tragic”, adding: “I don’t know about you but I’ve never seen such a culmination of events before or since in Formula 1.

“I remember watching Gilles Villeneuve die, looking through a Rediffusion shop window at a TV while Grandstand was on, standing there feeling completely shocked.

“But Imola was always just going to be dynamite because everything that happened was just so awful”.

Setting the scene

Ayrton Senna’s F1 career
in pictures

The film runs chronologically, with Imola and Senna’s funeral as its conclusion. After the Senna-Prost years the film moves on quite briskly to the events of 1994.

Pandey describes how they set the scene for the film’s denouement:

“We saw the original footage of him arriving on Thursday and he’s preoccupied, he has a funny exchange with Galvao Bueno walking up the pit lane. You see he’s frustrated.

“The Italian journalists want to know if Senna suspects something’s going on at Benetton and he enigmatically says ‘one cannot speak of things which one cannot prove’.

“So the idea is on Thursday he’s already really troubled by what’s going on in Formula 1. He’s lost for two years in a row and it wasn’t his fault.

“Now everybody thinks he’s got the best car. Everybody knows he’s got the best engine, he should be walking it, instead he hasn’t finished the first two races and he’s never had a season like that.

“You’re telling a sad tale now and I think the biggest challenge there is to continue the theme of the previous two years. He hasn’t suddenly become a rubbish driver, he hasn’t suddenly been trounced by a guy who he beat 5-1 with the same engine the year before”.

Editing Imola 1994

But inevitably the need to manage the length of film and amount of FOM footage used meant the sequence had to be carefully edited. Pandey described some of the footage that was left on the cutting room floor:

“The original Imola [sequence] was more than double the length that you see now.

“I remember one shot I felt so sad to lose. On Saturday Senna is standing in the Williams garage and the camera just happened to catch him behind, and he’s watching JJ Lehto, a point-of-view shot, and Lehto’s going through Tamburello.

“So you’re Senna, looking at Tamburello, from a driver’s point of view shot on a monitor. Even talking about that now just gives me goosebumps: you’re looking at Senna looking at where he’s going to die in 24 hours.

“That’s the kind of decision that had to be made that gave us the minutes that we could then invest.”

A second editor was brought in to help make the tough decisions about what to cut, “just fillet everything out”, as Pandey says, “because every frame you’re seeing now is ten times more powerful than all the frames you’ve seen”.

One shot that was left in shows Senna reporting back to the team on the changes they made to the FW16 that weekend in an attempt to cure its chronic handling problems:

“When we went to FOM and we looked at the archive for the first time. We saw this footage of a conversation with Adrian Newey and David Brown.

“[Senna says] ‘the car is…’ and he bites his tongue, looks away, and then he has to make eye contact and says ‘…worse’.

“Paddy Lowe, from McLaren, saw the film and said “believe me we’ve all been there. The driver comes back, and you ask what’s going on and he says ‘well it’s oversteering and understeering’.”

“I have to be honest with you, it was very painful watching all of that and deciding just how little, in a way, we could get away with”.

That still left the problem of dealing with the most harrowing moment of all – Senna’s death. The next instalment of “The Making of Senna” looks at how that was done.

“The Making of Senna” continues tomorrow.

To ensure you don’t miss an instalment subscribe to F1 Fanatic for free via RSS, Twitter or our email subscription service. Click here for more information.

See the official website for more information on the film and the official Facebook page for a list of cinemas that are showing it.

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Ayrton Senna’s F1 career in pictures | F1 pictures

Keith Collantine — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 07:10:32 +0000

Marking the opening of the film Senna in the UK, here’s a special gallery looking back on the three-times champion’s F1 career in pictures.

From his first test to his last race – here is the career of Ayrton Senna in pictures.

F1 pictures

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Images © Williams/LAT, Honda, Ford, “Senna”, Daimler

The Making of Senna part 6: The perfect bad guy? | Interview

Keith Collantine — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 08:18:07 +0000

Alain Prost, Williams, Adelaide, 1993

Alain Prost says he hasn’t watched the Senna film. He told the BBC he is “suspicious” of it.

But while Prost’s identity as Senna’s ultimate rival is not in doubt, he is arguably not the real villain of the piece.

Alain Prost

“I’m not going to watch the movie,” Prost told the BBC in an interview aired yesterday. “I have it on CD, maybe I will watch it one day.

“I have done the story myself. I know everything about the story. So it’s like when you have a nice dish, you don’t want to eat it cold, and I don’t want to answer all the questions.

“It’s a very difficult time. The way the movie is done, I am very suspicious. But I don’t want to answer more questions about that.”

Writer and an executive producer Manish Pandey met Prost, who he describes as “a very intelligent man”.

While the film has plenty to say about the rivalry between Senna and Prost, Pandey offered these thoughts on their battle for supremacy within McLaren:

“Prost was very clever. For example, people time themselves in very different ways on the circuit. So, in other words, you don’t do sectors one to three, you might do sectors three to three.

“Prost, apparently, was an absolute genius at that. I’ve very, very rarely met a man as intelligent as Alain Prost. An absolute perfectionist.”

He shared an interesting anecdote from a former tyre technician about how Senna responded to Prost putting one over him at a test session:

“[Prost] was very clever about how he would test parts. They would very seldom test together.

“This Goodyear tyre man told me that Senna turned up [at Silverstone] and he was really pissed off because there were some parts on [Prost's] car that Senna knew must have been faster and he wasn’t given them.

“Senna had been led to believe that these parts were no better but, of course, they were.”

Senna responded in kind the next time he was called on for testing:

“Apparently he turned up, put on load of parts, came back and said none of them worked.

“So that turned the tables for the next Grand Prix: Prost didn’t choose the parts, Senna bolted them on and off he went. There was that level of rivalry.”

But Prost isn’t treated as the villain of the piece: he’s the perfect rival, rather than the perfect bad guy. That role falls to someone else.

Jean-Marie Balestre

If any figure is drawn as a pantomime villain in Senna it’s the late Jean-Marie Balestre, president of FISA (now the FIA) until 1991.

“With Balestre you have the perfect bad guy” says Pandey. “He’s French – Vichy-French – with a black leather jacket, black shirt done up to here and likes to wear his FIA badge on his left arm like a swastika.

“If I’d written that you’d say ‘no-one’s going to believe this – go and write me a better villain!’”

Balestre’s autocratic, table-thumping style speaks for itself – he is seen telling the drivers at one briefing “the best decision is my decision!”

Pandey says: “We could have been much tougher on him.”

He refers to an incident at Interlagos in 1990, following the controversial conclusion to the 1989 championship, where Balestre reacted to abuse from the crowd saying: “This is our championship, if you don’t want it we don’t have to give it to you, you need to learn some manners.”

Balestre’s perceived closeness to Prost was the subject of much speculation at the time: “I think he was definitely biased, and part of his bias was a French bias – it wasn’t necessarily [just] Alain.

“You have a championship which has got rules in French, at that time, the Concorde Agreement is in French, signed in Paris, the FIA and FISA were in Paris. [Until 1985] there had never been a French world champion.”

In 1988 Senna won his first world championship despite Prost having a higher total points score. Prost had to discard more points under the “best 11 scores” rule.

In Pandey’s view, that rule had been introduced after Prost narrowly lost the 1984 title to his team mate:

“Prost had a real problem with the ‘best 11′ rule. The rule came in after 1984 when he’d won seven races to [Niki] Lauda’s four or five. The “best 11” rule was put in to stop consistency being the key to a championship.”

Pandey describes Balestre as someone who “[loved] acting up and playing up”.

“But people have looked back on his presidency and said ‘maybe it wasn’t that bad at all’. He did care very passionately about Senna.

“He was definitely someone who championed the drivers. Bernie [Ecclestone] said to us that he really cared about the drivers.

“He was the guy who banned [ground effect] skirts because he felt they were dangerous.”

Balestre died three years ago, but would Pandey feel comfortable if he was able to watch the film? On balance, he says: “I think we got it right”.

“If he was alive I think I’d be able to sit in a room and say ‘that’s how it was.’”

Senna opens in the UK on today. If you’ve seen the film and have a view to share on how it treats Prost and Balestre, please share it in the comments.

“The Making of Senna” continues tomorrow.

To ensure you don’t miss an instalment subscribe to F1 Fanatic for free via RSS, Twitter or our email subscription service. Click here for more information.

See the official website for more information on the film and the official Facebook page for a list of cinemas that are showing it.

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The Making of Senna part 5: The lost scenes | Interview

Keith Collantine — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:57:52 +0000

Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, McLaren, Estoril, 1988

One of the biggest challenges in creating the Senna film, according to its producers, was deciding what footage to use and what to cut.

This was a theme Senna film writer Manish Pandey returned to several times when I interviewed him.

Some footage of Senna at his best, such as his virtuoso drive at Donington Park in 1993, is not used.

Two key moments in the budding Senna-Prost rivalry at Estoril in 1988 and Imola in 1989, where Senna was criticised for his driving, are also missing.

As I wrote in F1 Fanatic’s review of Senna in December: “Perhaps these weren’t thought significant enough to include, but putting them in might have helped to balance the film’s view of Senna, which verges on the saintly at times”.

I put that view to Pandey who said the criticism was “well taken” and offered an explanation for why the scenes weren’t included.

Estoril 1988

Alain Prost won the 1988 Portugal Grand Prix but after a frightening encounter when Senna squeezed him towards the pit wall as the pair blasted, flat-out, down the pit straight.

Pandey said the main reason this was skipped in the film was because they thought the footage lacked impact:

“We watched Estoril ’88 for bloody hours and it just looked so bad on a big screen.

“Not just the quality, but the exciting bit is a guy pulling a pit board away – that’s the only time you realise there’s a squeeze going on. It’s not like the Barrichello-Schumacher squeeze [at the Hungaroring last year] because Prost is behind him at the squeeze when it happens.

“Actually, when you see it on a big screen and you see what’s happening, the guy pulling his pit board away is about 100 metres behind Prost when he does it – he’s reacted late.

“It looks fantastic when you’ve got a commentator on a small screen telling you what’s happened and you don’t have a chance to see it. But you can’t pull that off in a cinema – people will just be going, ‘what did he do there?’”.

Pandey also said a desire to ensure both sides of the story were told mitigated against including the sequence:

“This was the year Senna famously clammed up – we just couldn’t get the counter-argument in. So it would be basically Prost’s point of view and no counter-argument.”

Imola 1989

The agreement between Prost and Senna not to try to pass each other in the first corner at the San Marino Grand Prix has been the subject of much discussion. Prost claimed Senna broke the agreement after passing him at Tosa when the race was restarted following a red flag.

Pandey says a desire to present both sides of the story also played a part in the omission of Imola ’89:

“There’s a fantastic interlude that’s on the FOM Duke review tape for that year, with Alain at Monaco talking about the broken agreement. All his point of view, lots of smiling.

“The problem was that Senna didn’t speak about it. We could have done it, as long as we’d had a counter-argument from Senna. He spoke about it in AutoHebdo to Pierre [van Vliet] but the tape didn’t exist.

“So what could we do? We’d made a decision that we were not going to get actors to read out because then it’s not real.

“We desperately tried to find that tape to make Imola ’89 work. We even found footage of the two of them talking to each other after the Berger accident on the new grid. We tried using voiceover there but it just didn’t work.”

Pandey felt the nature of the agreement was difficult to convey with the footage available. Added to that was the challenge of explaining to non-F1 literate viewers that the two bends before Tosa were not considered corners:

“The problem then is the camera angle is just crap. You see Prost getting away with Senna behind him, then you see Senna pulling out.

“Because it’s not a conventional track and you don’t have a straight followed by a corner. You’ve got this huge great run, a long left into Tamburello, the right before Tosa, then you have the braking point at Tosa – you actually have three corners.

“The agreement was not to overtake under braking for the first corner.”

Pandey admits he would have liked to have covered more of the Senna-Prost rivalry in the interest of balance:

“In a way I feel we should have had a crack at it anyway, even if it was weak, because perhaps what would have happened people would have thought ‘well, I didn’t quite understand that, but I understand something happened’.

“The slight problem we have now is that we do have Ron Dennis saying, ‘er, it was a tough year, the next year’.

“But I agree, as a fan I remember sitting there and thinking OK, I understand all the technical reasons we have for not doing this but I do feel that it’s such a big rivalry, it’s going to carry on until the end of the film – until Prost literally crosses himself [at Senna's funeral], the rivalry hasn’t ended”.

Donington Park 1993

The reason for leaving out footage from Senna’s lauded drive in the 1993 European Grand Prix is simply that the footage didn’t look very good, according to director Asif Kapadia:

“It is amazing when you look at his driving how he wins in such an inferior car. But it is grey, it is pissing down with rain and no one is there.

“The camera work is awful too, even though they are driving at 190mph, it all looks so slow, so I chose not to make it a key sequence in the film.”

Familiarity also worked against some sequences as Eric Fellner, another of the film’s producers, explained: “With the race races that have been televised, what we tried to do was find angles.

“It sounds a bit nerdy, but we always tried to find the angle that hadn’t been broadcast.”

Five hours to 100 minutes

The team previewed thousands of hours of footage in Bernie Ecclestone’s video archive before creating a rough, five hour long cut of the film.

Pandey explains: “We got it from five hours to three, and that came down to two-and-a-half quite easily. But now it gets nasty.

“We knew we had to get down to 100 minutes because that’s really what it would sustain. And, my God, it was so hard.”

No doubt many F1 Fanatic readers would quite happily watch five hours of rare archive footage from the eighties and nineties. But there were reasons to cut the film other than the limited amount of footage they could obtain from Ecclestone:

“The problem is it becomes an issue of pacing. People have a feeling of expectation, if you set things up properly, that you’ve got to fulfil in a reasonable amount of time.

“And the nightmare is you want to get a little bit more in and you don’t know why but everyone’s a little bit exhausted, a bit lethargic.

“We had to fight for the 100 – it was meant to be 90, like most documentaries. But every time we chopped it to 90 it was like there was something missing. And when it got to 100 it just left you wanting that little bit more.”

Japan

There are two differences in the Japanese version of the film including one extra scene, as Pandey explains:

“In Japan we had to make two modifications to the film. John Bisigniano, when he walks down the pit lane in 1990 going “can you tell me what exactly happened, Ayrton?” – we had Kaz Kawai doing that in the Japanese version.

“Right at the end we used to have two Japanese journalists standing in front of the camera, trying to tell you that Ayrton Senna is dead, and they keep cracking up before they can say it. One keeps passing the other one the microphone, the other one drops his head because he can’t say it.

“Then Kaz appears in the pit lane, leans over the barrier and reads a prepared statement, and then gives these guys time to gather their thoughts. And they say: “We have this awful news to tell you”, “I wish he hadn’t died in this way”. It’s heartbreaking.

“We would have gone with it, but we were told that there was an opinion that it could almost look comic if you weren’t Japanese. It’s not an opinion I share.

“But the one place where we knew there would be no ambiguity was in Japan. And if it helps the Japanese viewers to understand that bit even more, they should have it.”

‘What I would have changed’

Pandey has two clear ideas about how he would like to change the film. One of which is showing a little more of Senna’s questionable moves in his rivalry with Prost: “It’s such a big rivalry and I think we made a mistake by not finding one tiny bit of touchpaper to light.”

The second was to use Gerhard Berger in part of a sequence from 1990: “You see Senna on the beach, thinking about giving up Formula 1, and Ron Dennis says ‘I called him and persuaded him to come back and told him you can’t let the dark forces win’.

The next shot is a Steadicam shot of Ayrton walking around a Shell truck and John Bisigniano saying ‘in 1990 he came back stronger, he came back wiser, Alain Prost had gone out of the team to Ferrari‘.

“That should have been Gerhard’s voice, and he should have said, ‘in 1990 I came into the team, Prost went to Ferrari’ – exactly the same thing, and you see maybe a two-shot of them.

“Then on the podium in 1991 when they’re spraying champagne and Ayrton’s the champion, Gerhard should have been speaking to us then going: ‘he was triple-champion now, we had great times, we had our own jets, I used to put frogs in his hotel room’.

“If we’d just had that over the podium that would have given the film this thing that’s missing.”

Tamburello

One of the last cuts made to the film removed a sequence about Senna’s death. Producer James Gay-Rees said: “We have footage of Senna standing at the corner at Imola a month before he died, during testing, and he is saying, ‘Somebody is going to die at this corner this year.’”

Pandey explained: “In the original treatment it had this section at Imola about Tamburello, explaining that in ’87 [Nelson] Piquet had an accident and walked away, and in ’89 Berger had an accident, had minor burns, and walked away.

“In ’94 Senna was testing there and we had footage of him there, pointing to Tamburello. And we had this cut with Senna pointing out that he wasn’t completely happy and Gerhard talking about how they’d decided they should try to modify it but couldn’t because of the river.

“And that was a very poignant section. Of the things that we did, that worked and we just couldn’t get in, that was the thing that I miss the most.”

Condensing so much material into a one-and-three-quarter hour film was always going to leave them with difficult choices. “People are paying money to see this film”, says Pandey, “and I don’t think they have to see it three times to go, ‘oh, what a great film’, it’s got to pay off the first time you see it.

“Hopefully, overall, you come away thinking it’s a pretty damn good movie and you’ve got an idea of who he was, not just as a racing driver, but who he was in the scheme of things in Formula 1.”

“The Making of Senna” continues tomorrow.

To ensure you don’t miss an instalment subscribe to F1 Fanatic for free via RSS, Twitter or our email subscription service. Click here for more information.

Senna opens in the UK on June 3rd. See the official website for more information and the official Facebook page for a list of cinemas that are showing it.

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Image © Williams/LAT

The Making of Senna part 4: ‘You’ve never heard F1 sound like this’ | Interview

Keith Collantine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:13:36 +0000

Ayrton Senna, Nicola Larini, TI Aida, 1994

Watching F1 in the cinema will be an unusual experience for fans who go to see the Senna film.

The makers of Senna have gone to considerable lengths to ensure the sights – and sounds – do justice to the sport.

Here’s how they did it.

Cleaning up the sound

The sounds heard during the Senna movie are not always those which were originally recorded. But an exhaustive process of sound editing means they are authentic and deliver greater impact.

The splashes of rain at Monaco, Alessandro Nannini locking his wheels as Senna passes him at Suzuka, and the gut-wrenching booms as cars strike barriers in Imola, have all been painstakingly re-touched for maximum clarity.

The film’s writer Manish Pandey explains: “The whole film [sound] was remixed at Twickenham studio by an unbelievably talented bunch of guys. They’re obsessive-compulsive, and brilliantly so.”

He gives an example of the changes made to the onboard camera footage of Senna driving during the race at Imola:

“When you are in the Williams for the last time, all the gear changes are correct, all the noises you’re hearing are correct, but what we’ve had to do is take it from the previous lap, because it was a cleaner sound.

“We transposed it, but of course the laps were slightly different lengths, so they had to do little cuts. The idea was to bring up the edited noise and bring down the crowd noise when we needed to.”

In other cases the sounds was edited to remove details that might sound confusing to the ear: “When [Rubens] Barrichello crashes, originally there was a sound like glass breaking.

“But as I explained to them there’s no glass in Formula 1 cars, it’s all carbon fibre and Kevlar, so it would be a much more plasticky noise. They managed to change it, so it’s very authentic.

“The sound design is a whole other thing for this film – you won’t have heard Formula 1 sound like this before.”

“How did he do that? That’s him”

The remixed sound is accompanied by a musical score written by Antonio Pinto, the composer best known for his work on City of God.

A committed Senna fan, Pinto got in touch with Pandey as soon as he heard about the project: “He literally got his agent to contact us and said ‘I want to do the music’.

“He sent us three tracks – the first one is the theme, and they’re all in the film.

“I remember listening to it and my jaw dropped and I went ‘That is Senna. How did he do that? That’s him’”.

However some parts of the score were intentionally left out during the editing process:

“One piece that came from another film that he’d done, which we used to use when Roland Ratzenberger died, we removed.

“We wanted to have a section without any music, which would give more impact on Sunday when the music starts.

“That piece of music was just unbelievably good.”

Cutting the film to length gave the filmmakers some of their biggest challenges. The next part of “The making of Senna” will explain why some of the most pivotal moments in his F1 career did not make it into the film.

“The Making of Senna” continues tomorrow.

To ensure you don’t miss an instalment subscribe to F1 Fanatic for free via RSS, Twitter or our email subscription service. Click here for more information.

Senna opens in the UK on June 3rd. See the official website for more information.

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The Making of Senna part 3: Inside the F1 archive | Interview

Keith Collantine — Tue, 31 May 2011 17:10:45 +0000

Ayrton Senna, McLaren, Monte-Carlo, 1990

The international version of Senna weighs in at one hour and 45 minutes long.

Much of that is material from the F1 archives.

But in order to get access to the vast vault of F1 video stored at Biggin Hill, the producers of Senna first had to persuade Bernie Ecclestone to do a deal with them.

“Give us all the money you’ve got”

Getting the Senna family on-side (see part two) had been the first step towards that, as the film’s writer and executive producer Manish Pandey explained:

“Once Vivianne [Senna] had agreed she made a phone call to Bernie, saying that we came with her blessing, and to please meet with us and help us because we really wanted to do this film.”

Their first meeting with Ecclestone lasted 17 minutes: “I was more nervous meeting Bernie for the first time than I was about going to Brazil because with he comes with so much form.

“You’ve seen him on TV, he’s supposed to be this fearsome negotiator, but he was brilliant.

“We met in a small room at Prince’s Gate with his lawyer, who’s now become a great friend. He beat us up for a bit and then Bernie came in.

“Bernie sussed us out, asked a couple of questions, offered a few bits of opinion. We shook hands and he said: ‘give us all the money you’ve got and we’ll see what we can do.’

“He knew we weren’t going to turn up with $50 million but he saw that we were very serious.”

“Like a kid in a candy shop”

The team had to lobby Ecclestone for first-hand access to the archive instead of just requesting footage and being sent it.

“We had to explain that’s not really how films work – we had to go in and see what’s there.

“Eventually they agreed and gave us four weeks’ access to the archive. No-one had ever had that. It was like being a kid in a candy shop.”

Pandey described the excitement of turning up never-before-seen footage of Senna’s career – including pivotal moments at Imola in 1994:

“Occasionally we’d make a discovery and I went ‘hold on, that is the date, that’s qualifying, that’s the Friday!’

“And you suddenly realise you’ve got the moment, and you’re looking at him with bloodshot eyes because he’s deciding ‘am I going to race?’”

The wealth of material on offer presented them with one of the toughest challenges of making the film. Namely, deciding what to leave out and what to leave in.

An F1 career that spanned 11 years had to be condensed into 80 minutes of footage (with the rest coming from, among other sources, television channels and the Sennas’ home videos).

Pandey said: “FOM have never given anybody 80 minutes before, and asking for more than that would be taking the piss. They’ve been unbelievably generous.”

Inevitably, questions have been raised (including in F1 Fanatic’s review of Senna) about why certain races or incidents were left out. A later part of this series will explore that in detail.

Driver’s-eye view

In some ways, the old footage used in the film has a greater impact than modern broadcasts, despite being lower quality.

This is particularly true of the on-board camera shots, which Pandey says “really give a sense of how violent it is”:

“In those cars the cameras were basically at driver’s eye height. So you’re at one side but you can see their hands in the cockpit.

“One of the flaws, I think, with modern Formula 1 cameras, is that they make it look like you’re eight metres away, and it’s far too smooth.

“With Senna, at Monaco especially, you can see just how bumpy it is.”

This may even lead to changes in how modern F1 is filmed:

“Interestingly we showed Bernie’s lawyers and commercial people the film for the first time, then we noticed at Brazil they moved Fernando’s camera position lower and to one side.”

“The Making of Senna” continues tomorrow.

To ensure you don’t miss an instalment subscribe to F1 Fanatic for free via RSS, Twitter or our email subscription service. Click here for more information.

Senna opens in the UK on June 3rd. See the official website for more information.

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The Making of Senna part 2: Meeting the Sennas | Interview

Keith Collantine — Fri, 27 May 2011 11:05:06 +0000

Ayrton Senna, Lotus-Renault 97T, 1985

Senna was not the first film about the life of Ayrton Senna to be approved by his family.

The year after his death, Senna’s relatives approved plans for a feature film with a $100m budget in which Antonio Banderas was set to play the part of Senna. It was never made.

Fast-forward 11 years to March 2006, and Manish Pandey along with fellow executive produce James Gay-Rees were at the Instituto Ayrton Senna in Sao Paulo, preparing to pitch their concept to Senna’s sister and mother.

One Senna film pitch every month

They had already met a representative of the family, Celso Lemos, in London the previous year. He told them the family received a “serious offer” about doing something similar at least once per month.

Pandey relates the story of the meeting: “At lunch James, Celso and I just spoke and something clicked.

“He realised we were very sincere in what we were up to and were willing to go as long as it took – and that we weren’t out to make ‘The Death of Ayrton Senna’. He admitted at the end ‘I get all these offers and I basically know it’s all about the death of Ayrton Senna because that’s what everyone’s heard of.’

“That parallels with something Ron Dennis told us. He said ‘What I find very difficult to deal with is the fact that he drove for us for six years, yet the biggest images of this man are in white and blue at his death.’

“It really sticks in Ron’s throat – purely in a sense that, yes, Senna’s death was monumental but that’s not the thing to remember him by. And the Sennas were never interested in doing that.”

“At the end of lunch Celso embraced us both – it was incredibly emotional, actually, because I’m a fan, and I was sitting there with someone who was a heartbeat away from what I’d always cared the most about, outside my family. He was really responding to what I wanted to write.

“Afterwards he said, ‘I think you’ll do it’, which I thought was an amazing thing to say to two people he’d never met before.”

“You really knew my brother”

Celso arranged for Pandey to do a presentation for the family in Sao Paulo at the Instituto:

“I did a 40-minute presentation going through from this young man arriving in Formula 1 on a rainy day in Monaco and ending with photos of Nelson Piquet, Nigel Mansell and Alain Prost as they are now, dissolving into the bronze statue of Senna at Imola – so he was the immortal one, if you like.”

Pandey recalls that within a few minutes of the presentation starting Senna’s mother started to weep. By the end the whole family were in tears: “I remember having to stop and say ‘please don’t cry, because if you cry, I’ll cry, and then we won’t get anywhere!’”

Despite the melancholy tone Pandey made it clear that he would not overlook the controversial moments in Senna’s career:

“In that presentation I could and I remember thinking ‘don’t be scared, it’s OK talking about the dark side of Senna because you’ve got to do it at some point’. The worst thing would have been to be really dishonest and then come back and say we wanted to put this and that in.

“So I talked about the British media’s response to him, the incidents with Mansell, and they all responded to that. They were very objective people and I think they understand that you can’t go off into some weird hagiography. If you do that, no-one enjoys it, it’s a cartoon.

“The last few slides were of him after the accident, the helicopter. The whole room was crying and she hugged me and said ‘you really knew my brother’. That was the most incredible thing because I’d never met him.

“They said ‘yes’ – but it took us two years to complete the deal after that.”

Pandey returned to Brazil the following year in November to introduce them to Asif Kapadia, who by then had come on board as director. In the meantime they had cut together a short demo version of the film:

“I had all my F1 tapes and there’s also YouTube which you can download clips from, and we made a little ten-minute movie in three acts. We showed it to the people here [at Working Title] and they suddenly understood the film.”

Talking heads

This led them to one of the film’s most powerful devices. Unusually for a documentary, it avoids the use of ‘talking head’ interviews, relying on pre-recorded voiceovers instead.

Pandey explains: “Asif was the one who said to me ‘I don’t think we need talking heads’.

The abundance of footage of Senna allowed them that luxury: “This guy had been filmed from so many different angles.

“There was something organic about it as well – it starts off in really low resolution but by the end of his life he was being shot in really fantastic film.”

Pandey created a 256-page, colour-coded script to organise all the material they had found – and hoped to find:

“Everything in black was something I had seen and transcribed. Everything in green was something I’d read and purple was descriptions of events in books which might not have been filmed.

“And then there was light blue – for footage I wished existed!”

Ten voices

The next step was an exhaustive process of interviewing:

“We wrote up a list of 63 people we thought we should interview. We knew we had to interview Senna’s mum and Vivianne – his father’s never, ever given an interview.

“We knew we had to interview Alain [Prost] and Ron Dennis.”

These are four of the ten people who are heard during the film. The others include Frank Williams, Professor Sid Watkins, Brazilian F1 presenter Reginaldo Leme and The Guardian’s Richard Williams.

Pandey also approached Pierre van Vliet, formerly of French channel TF1: “one of those rare people who was very good friends with Alain Prost and Ayrton Senna”.

The tenth voice is of John Bisigniano. Pandey described this as a “controversial” choice but says: “If you look in 1990, John does all the best commentary in Suzuka. He’s the guy who grabs Ayrton in the pit lane.”

The commentaries turn the assembled footage into a narrative: “We let them say it in their own words, we tried it out, and if it didn’t absolutely work we would get them to re-record certain sections, make them shorter and so on.

“The journalists became the glue. But then we had that age-old problem which is you know what the key moments are in the story and you’re trying desperately hard to illustrate them.”

The key to that was getting the footage – and that meant a visit to meet Bernie Ecclestone.

“The Making of Senna” continues after the Monaco Grand Prix.

Senna opens in the UK on June 3rd. See the official website for more information.

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