The Making of Diego Maradona

On the latest Footballco Business Podcast,?we celebrated the anniversary of Diego Maradona signing for Napoli by re-publishing the 2019 GOAL interview with the Director and Editor of the Maradona documentary, Diego Maradona.

During the interview, Asif Kapadia and Chris King (Director and Editor, respectively) discuss the process of making the definitive documentary on Maradona's time at Napoli and what it was like working with one of the greatest and most unpredictable players of all time.

Three highlights from the show are below, but if you want to download and listen to the full show, you can search for the Footballco Business Podcast or?click here.

The interview is also available on YouTube.

Focusing on Naples

Kapadia's film doesn't begin in Naples, it begins with a montage of his time at Barcelona, leading to the injury at the end of his period in Spain, shortly before his transfer to Napoli. In fact, the original plan wasn't to focus on Napoli, the first long edit went from his childhood to the present day. But once the film started to come together it became clear that this is where the story was and that Naples was almost the geographical embodiment of Maradona. As Chris King puts it...

This was the time when he hit the greatest hits of his career and it was the beginning of everything that would go wrong in his life.

And Kapadia adds...

The opening sequence, up to the point where he got to Naples, was 45 minutes. And that's our mad and crazy five minute opening...that's the tough call we had to make...it's an incredibly long and rich and dark story at times.

Interviewing Diego

Maradona was never going to be a straightforward interview. Prior to Diego Maradona, Kapadia's best-known films were the biopics on Amy Winehouse and Ayrton Senna, both filmed after their deaths with interviews conducted with the people who knew them best and compared to Maradona, were relatively to get time with.

For Diego Maradona, Kapadia was promised three three-hour interviews with. But, as it turned out, if he was lucky each interview would last ninety minutes. And, of course, these ninety-minute interviews were not going to go to plan. As Kapadia says...

He is a master of deception. You ask him a question about his son and he gives you a brilliant answer about Sepp Blatter. Which for a lot of people is gold dust and he knows he's given a great headline, but in our case, we're like 'great, but can we get back to the question'...and it got a bit cold in that room in Dubai, it got a bit awkward. He did look at me and say, 'you've got a real nerve asking me these questions, to my face. But for that, I respect you.

Shooting football

Much of the match footage shown in Diego Maradona came from a team of videographers who were following Maradona during his time in Naples and recording matches from the sidelines, focusing on Diego. As such, the footage is reminiscent of Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait. But footage shot in this way didn't cover all the angles, or help to make an engaging film for the big screen, so King had to get creative.

I needed something to cut to, so I'd look at the RAI coverage and they inverabley went to that big top shot from up in the stands. It looked terrible on the big screen. it killed the excitement and the kinetic energy. But, they quite often showed the slow motion replays and that was from pitchside cameras. So, I would take the slow-mo and speed it back up to normal speed and cut that into the other footage so I'd have two angles...Post-production was a bit of a nightmare for the guys that had to take that on.

For the full interview with Asif and Chris, listen to the Footballco Business Podcast.