Stranger Than Fiction: Can you convey to us what director Asif Kapadia said about the origins of this film?

Tom O’Keefe: It’s been 17 years since Ayrton Senna died in that race on May 1, 1994, and it’s been during all that time that people have been saying, when is there going to be a film about Ayrton Senna. One of the main considerations along the way is whether there should have been an actor. Antonio Banderas, in the last 10 years, was thought to be a good candidate, and he kind of looks like Senna. But in the end, no one could ever get the rights, no one could ever get the approval of the people who controlled all of the footage that you just saw. So it never happened until these two guys came along. Asif and [writer] Manish Pandey, a Formula 1 fan principally, the two of them convinced the leader of this sport, an 80-year-old billionaire named Bernie Ecclestone, to give the filmmakers access to hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage under one condition. That they come to the airport where the film archives are kept. They sat there, the way you would at the public library here in New York, and submitted requests, and out would come the archive. They reviewed each race that way, and they finally got more and more sophisticated at it, and realized there were sometimes five or six angles of Senna. Then they went to Brazil and got the local footage. Those of you who watch Formula 1 on ESPN or Speed Channel, you’re not seeing the Brazilian coverage that you’ve seen tonight, which is very special. You can see they have some family footage as well, which is very rare. The film took 17 years because of the nature of it. And I think if you see this film, one of the things that comes across is that Ayrton Senna was an exceptionally intelligent guy, who understood himself and his profession. And is more eloquent, even than the current Formula 1 group of drivers. To have someone else play Ayrton Senna would probably have been a mistake. So this is as close as you’re going to get to hearing his story. Although there is a lot of left out, naturally. And there is a five-hour version of the film that in my dreams will come out in a special DVD.

STF: You’re steeped in the history of the sport, what does Senna mean to you personally in the pantheon of drivers?

O’Keefe: The reason I think I like this film, is that I really think Senna is a sportsman of the highest order in terms of his perfection and dedication. We have a lot of important things going on in this world, and the idea that someone would race a car, go around in circles and try to beat somebody by a thousandth of a second doesn’t seem very important. But he did it as well or better than anyone else, I just admire his commitment and his dedication to the smallest things. One of the things that doesn’t come out in that film, is that part of his secret was his relationship with the engineers who worked on his cars. He may have been politically tone-deaf, as you see in his altercations with the officialdom of the FIA [Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile], but behind the scenes he was very close with the Honda mechanics who were working on his car. The last day that he lived, he was sitting in the garage in his civilian clothes. You never see that today, the drivers don’t go in early. He was talking to the engineers, the mechanics. He was talking to the most famous aerodynamicist in Formula 1, Adrian Newey. Part of his secret was his relationship with all of his mechanics, particularly the Japanese. Since Honda engines powered most of his victories, they had [Alain] Prost to choose from and Senna to choose from. From the standpoint of the Japanese mechanics, Prost was called “The Computer,” and Senna was called “The Samurai.”

STF: As someone who comes from outside this film, one thing that really strikes me is the politics of Formula 1 and how Senna had trouble navigating that. How much has the organization changed since then?

O’Keefe: The sport is called Formula 1, however at an earlier stage it was called Grand Prix racing. It really starts in 1903 with the first Grand Prix, and it really has been French-influenced from the beginning. The headquarters of the FIA is actually in the Place de Concorde in Paris. The French have always been very much in control, and during Senna’s period, exclusively so. Today there are no French drivers, but in that era France ran driver schools and had ladder systems so young drivers could find their way to the top. Prost was the final working out of the system. At the very top was [racing executive Jean-Marie] Balastre, who is a perfect villain in the piece. The other thing that the filmmakers do, is that all of those drivers meetings that you see are totally private, even today. So the access that the filmmakers had to the archival footage gave all of us an insight into those drivers meetings. And it’s in those meetings that you gain insight into Senna’s true character. You see that he was his own best defense lawyer, but he could also be a little bit of a spoiled brat.

Audience: I was curious as to how Senna and Prost’s relationship came to turn around, how did that happen?

O’Keefe: Why it changed, I don’t know. It had to be both sides contributing. You can see that neither one of them is a very forgiving person, but they had both achieved what they had wanted. At early stages of their careers they had both vetoed a driver. In the first scenes you see Senna veto a driver that was going to be competitive with him at Lotus, and then later on Prost vetoed Senna. You see in the garage in the race in which Senna was killed, Alain Prost was sitting right there as an ex-driver in the Williams garage. He was in the garage on the day of the death of his chief rival. So they had reconciled, but how it came about I can’t say I really know.

Audience: There was a big court case in which the Italian government prosecuted the Williams team for their car, I was surprised that the filmmakers didn’t include any of that.

O’Keefe: I think that’s symptomatic of the two filmmakers and how sensitive they are. There’s a lot of footage, and it would have been very easy to have gone totally tabloid in this film, particularly on that weekend. There was a person killed in Italy, and that particular weekend there were two people killed. There was a big investigation that went on for years. There are all sorts of conspiracy theories, there is footage from different cameras as to what happened. That car was impounded in Italy for years and years, we believe it’s been returned to England. People were indicted—Frank Williams, Adrian Newey. And for many years they didn’t go to Italy because they were afraid of getting apprehended. There were two trials that were dropped, and the case is officially over. But it is one of those things that they didn’t go into that might be in the five-hour version. Maybe they just threw their hands up at 104 minutes. That whole investigation—where the car is, and the helmet is still a little bit of a mystery.

Audience: Why do you think people have paid so much attention to Senna and his life after all these years, even though other drivers have died in races? Was it his skill on the track, or his relationship to the people?

O’Keefe: You’re right that other drivers have died since then. I think part of his secret is that Brazil was very much behind him at that time, and Brazil at that time had a number of good drivers. So we had a country that was way into Formula 1 at just that period. One of the more interesting scenes, if you’re a Formula 1 fan, is when Nelson Piquet, one of Senna’s archrivals and a Brazlian, basically stood up for Ayrton Senna’s altercation with Prost. They were Brazilian first and rivals second. But, to me, he was the most complete driver and person. Jim Clark, who also died in a car at the top of his profession, was a sheep farmer from Scotland and one of my favorite drivers. But he didn’t have all the facets that Senna did. There’s one brief scene where you see Senna moving construction debris in Sao Paulo. There’s no driver in Formula 1 that’s doing that now. He had other dimensions and a breadth that I think most drivers didn’t have. And he went out at the top of his profession for sure. He certainly had every up and down that anyone would ever want in life. He won, he lost. Women are portrayed very well in this film. No one has asked me if he was married.

STF: Was he?

O’Keefe: A lot of Formula 1 drivers, if you look at their biographies, they have a lot of children but were never married. Senna was married. In the very early scenes, when you see him go to England, he went with his childhood sweetheart. They were married at 20 or 21. He took her to England but it just didn’t work out. She went back to Brazil and he went back to England. They were married for technically five years, but that was his only marriage. The girlfriends are very well portrayed. That’s a part of Formula 1 that we never see.

Audience: Would you say that Senna was a better wet driver than [Formula One driver Michael] Schumacher?

O’Keefe: Schumacher, in some weird way, was the car right behind Senna when Senna was killed. He succeeded Senna’s mantle. Now having had seven championships, Michael Schumacher has technically surpassed Senna in the statistics. But he decided to unretire and is now a mid-level driver, he’s not doing very well. I don’t think there’s any question that Senna was a better driver overall, a more interesting person overall, and probably a better driver in the wet. No one seems to have exceeded him. Some of the footage not shown was when in 1993 he went from fifth to first in one lap in the driving rain.

STF: You were recently at the Indianapolis 500 that was kind of led by a Brazilian team of drivers. Can you tell us about that?

O’Keefe: We were there to show Senna to a Brazilian group. The Brazilians are more into Indy car racing than Formula 1. Brazil has a trade group that backs a lot of Brazilian drivers in the Indianapolis form of racing. They were so keen to have this film that they arranged a special showing within what they call Gasoline Alley at the Indy 500. Brazlian drivers came and introduced the film.

[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity]

Stranger Than Fiction: What got you started on Bobby Fischer as a subject?

Liz Garbus: On January 18, 2008, the day after Bobby Fischer died I was on an airplane and read his obituary. I had four or five hours on the plane to obsess about it and think about it. I got off the plane and immediately looked into it more and became convinced that I wanted to make a film about it.

STF: Had you been interested in Fischer before, or was it really that obituary that put it in your mind?

Garbus: I, like most Americans, knew something about him. I played chess, although not seriously at all. He was in the twilight in between remembering and forgetting, and for me, learning more about him was kind of this delicious journey of all these things that I had sort of known about, but was only the tip of the iceberg. That was the process for me, and I hope also for the viewer.

STF: There’s so much rich archival footage in here. You’ve got Bobby Fischer when he’s very young, the confrontation at the end with Dick Schaap’s son. Can you talk about finding these pieces?

Garbus: I had a crack archival team. It was probably a year of banging down doors all over the world trying to search for things we knew existed, or thought existed but couldn’t get. That was a huge effort.

STF: How about the interview process, picking who you were going to interview. Were there people you couldn’t get that you wanted?

Garbus: Yeah, there were definitely people we tried to get who ultimately weren’t in the film, and there always are in films. For instance, Zita Raiczanyi, who was the girlfriend of Bobby’s who helped arrange the 1992 revenge match with [Boris] Spassky, was someone we were talking too and hoped would come around to the table. But she was like, sorry, I want to close this chapter of my life. Of course Spassky was someone we spoke to a lot. At some points he seemed open to it, at other points not. His health kind of declined and we seemed to have missed the window on that.

Audience: Can you talk about how you approached the interviews and where you shot them?

Garbus: I wanted to create architectural spaces for the interviews that in some ways echoed chess games and a journey into psychology and knowing. We looked for spaces that had that kind of depth and those kind of architectural elements that in some way evoked chess but also had great depth to them, which was our journey in trying to know Bobby. In some ways, he’s always unknowable, but we continue to walk down that hall that’s sort of endless. Of course we couldn’t always carry that out. Henry Kissenger said be at my office at 5 p.m. and be out at 5:15. Where we could and where we had a little more control of the circumstances we tried to create those environments.

Audience: I noticed the score was all original, can you talk about that?

Garbus: The composer was Philip Sheppard, who’s extraordinary. But there were also about seven or eight licensed songs in the film.

Audience: There’s no mention Fischer after the 1992 match until his resurfacing in 2004. Do you have any information on that?

Garbus: What we understand from that period in time was that Fischer was going from country to country. The way that one could access Bobby Fischer from that time was to listen to his call-ins to radio shows. That was the way he would interface with the public. And we listened to those 200-some hours of call-ins for some sort of clue—some sort of insight into Bobby’s state of being, his thoughts. It was that kind of needle stuck in the record of that anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, conspiracy theories. A little of that goes a long way, I think, in terms of understanding where Bobby’s mind was during those years.

Audience: The beginning of the film’s structure is sort of circular, going back in time, and then catching up with yourself. About halfway through it becomes more linear, and I was curious about that.

Garbus: I want to acknowledge Michael Levine, who took over editing after the passing of our editor Karen Schmeer, who the film is dedicated to. Michael and I worked on the structure somewhat endlessly. We wanted the match of 1972, which was so exciting and had such great narrative elements, to be the narrative spine of the film. But at a certain point Bobby won, and after that is the beginning of the end in terms of how his life unraveled. The way we saw it was that the first two acts of the film are the match of 1972 interviewed with his background, and then time catches up to itself. And then there’s 1975, when he refuses to defend his title, and that’s the beginning of the end.

Audience: How did you recover from the loss of editor Karen Schmeer?

Garbus: Obviously Karen’s death was a shock. She was 39 years old and was hit by a car while crossing the street after getting some groceries. She was taken from all of us, and many of us were friends with her. She was extraordinarily talented and there are some segments of the film which she edited which are largely the same. Michael Levine, who is also a friend of Karen’s, came on board. I said, Michael I don’t know how you feel about this because we’re in the middle of this film, and this is hard. He said, there’s nothing I want to do more than finish this in her honor, and he worked amazingly hard to finish it without ego, and respecting her. It was an extraordinary gift that he gave the project.

STF: There’s so much to dislike about Bobby Fischer, but one thing I like about the film is that it acknowledged his highly problematic side, but also gives due to his accomplishments. Can you talk about working that balance out?

Garbus: People ask a lot about the unlikeability of Fischer. In a certain way, I never had that problem because working with all this material I felt empathetic to him. It was so clear that that later Bobby was not some organized ideology of somebody who was going to commit a violent act, but was somebody who was suffering, who was ill. I found the early Bobby arrogant and narcissistic but also very charming. I was surprised how often he could be relaxed and have a laugh at himself openly and honestly. We look at all of this footage and see this relentless pursuit of him by the media. For somebody who’s in the limelight so young it’s tremendous pressure. I approached him with empathy and tried to make other people not hate him.

Audience: His mother and sister were such fascinating characters, was there more there?

Garbus: I kept looking for more of Regina [mother] and Joan [sister]. When we were pouring over the 200 hours of Bobby calling in to the radio shows, which is the most Bobby anywhere, I kept thinking, he’s got to talk about his mother, he’s got to talk more about his sister. But he really didn’t. I think the only film footage that existed of Regina was when she would go to these protests, and we included all of that. Bobby’s comments on them were limited to what he said on the bench, that he didn’t see them that much. He never got more into it. We were limited in our access to that information. Bobby did not go there, so it was difficult for us to go there.

Audience: I noticed near the end you showed him walking with Miyoko Watai, now officially declared to have been his wife. You must have tried to contact Marilyn Young, and Jenky. What happened?

Garbus: Miyoko Watai is the women walking with Bobby in Reykjavik who became friends with Bobby during his years Japan and was instrumental in getting him released from prison. Upon his death, she presented the marriage certificate which some people doubted but was later upheld by an Icelandic court as valid. Most of the people who knew them describe the relationship as a friendship, as companionship, but they seem to have been married. She never responded to any of our requests for interviews. We did interview Marilyn Young, who was a Filipino girlfriend of Bobby’s who claimed to have a daughter by him. Later it was proven by DNA results that she was not his daughter. We interviewed her, ultimately it did not make it into the film. Their relationship, in the scope of Bobby Fischer’s life, was not a major one. And of course the daughter is not his. It just doesn’t shed that much light onto Bobby Fischer.

Audience: One of the more interesting rumors about Bobby was that he would play chess online. Did you come across anything about that?

Garbus: Many people playing chess online would recognize Fischer in the play and would feel that they were playing Bobby Fischer. That came from many different corners. I don’t think there’s any way we’ll ever know, he never confessed to doing so.

Stranger Than Fiction: About 12 years ago I was trying to develop a documentary about a mall, and one of the things that was an impediment to it was that a mall is private space. It’s hard to even get on the property to film there. What was that like, filming within that location?

Vera Aronow: We had mixed experiences. As you point out, the contrast between the private space and the public space was stark. At all the public meetings we were welcomed by the town, but when we went to the mall we had to ask permission. During much of the time they granted it willingly they were trying to maintain good relations with the community, and we were part of the community. We were all part of the community and lived within a mile of the mall site. Generally speaking, they granted us permission when we wanted to go, as long as we were escorted. That did introduce some limitations. The day the mall opened, Nancy Kerrigan was going to sign autographs inside one of the stores, then it wasn’t the developers say so anymore, it was the store chain. Then we had to call up to Massachusetts to their headquarters to get permission, and they said, we don’t really see what’s in it for us, so we’ll take a pass. So we stopped having so much access. Also, there were some things that we wanted to shoot that we just went ahead and shot.

Sarah Mondale: The Palisades Center, we just contacted them and said, if you want your point of view portrayed, then you need to grant us the interview time, as with Tom Valenti. So they did. We had more trouble filming other malls in the surrounding areas. We were almost arrested in New Jersey.

Roger Grange: Yeah, after 9/11 they said we were terrorists.

Mondale: I also wanted to mention that Shirley Lasker is here, who led the anti-mall activism.

Audience: I thought you should have done more filming of the people losing their businesses. Also, did they receive any incentives to help them with their survival?

Mondale: I don’t know. In Rockland, [James Howard] Kunstler, who’s the man who has written a lot about suburban sprawl, he said that a phenomenon that happens often is that businesspeople in the town feel that, they’re businesspeople, we’re business people. We’re all in the same business together. So they see the malls as friendly, at least at first. You even saw that Tom Valenti got the business leader of the year award. Ultimately, I think they were harmed by it. Shirley could answer this better, the town has all of these revitalization programs going on to help those businesses, especially in towns that have suffered.

Shirley Lasker: What happened initially is that business owners thought that the mall would help them. And of course it didn’t help them. And when it didn’t help them, they said, can you help us? And what we did is push for revitalization of all our hamlet centers, which are really back to the Main Street neighborhoods that everybody wanted. I’ve been in office for 12 years now, I’m now deputy supervisor. The whole trajectory of the town has changed since I’ve been in office. What we’ve done is, hamlet center by hamlet center, we’re all now creating these Main Street neighborhoods where businesses can thrive, and that’s what people really want. Because what you have now at the Mall are people coming from the outside. And the people from the community just want to shop locally.

Audience: Was the mall really sinking?

Grange: I don’t think it was ever really sinking, but there are places in the basement—which is a parking garage—where the asphalt really dips. And then they would pour more asphalt on it. But the pilings that were holding the mall up were never really sinking. They put pilings down to bedrock, even though there’s a toxic waste dump in between. The mall’s structure isn’t going to fall. But they do have enormous cracks in the concrete. Rosie O’Donnell did a spoof at the mall because she liked shopping there [about the sinking mall], but we couldn’t use it because NBC wouldn’t let us, it was way to expensive. It was a rumor, but I don’t think it was really sinking. The cracks are bad, but I think that was just cheap construction.

STF: Did you have an opportunity to show this film in Syracuse where this new Destiny mall is coming in?

Mondale: We have not shown it in Syracuse.

Audience: The film could be used as a powerful organizing tool. Is there a organization strategy associated with the film? And also, one of the lessons learned was that, in the end, the mall was built. So for other communities, how would you advise them so the next mall doesn’t get built?

Grange: That’s exactly why we wanted to make the film in the first place. It was to say, okay, this is what they’re saying, it’s going to bring all of this great tax money into the town. We wanted to be able to take this to other communities. We don’t really have a strategy yet for getting it to every community in a systematic way. We certainly hope the word gets out and people come to us and ask for it. I think it is a great tool for people to see what the problems are in dealing with a large developer, not just for malls, but for any large development. Towns are not really prepared to deal with the kind of large business machine that they’re up against. Big cities can do it much better because they have more resources. But hopefully it will be helpful to smaller towns that have to deal with this. We’ve had quite a bit of interest from planning schools and architecture schools too. I think they understand how important this is because students of architecture don’t get to go before a town board when they’re students and deal with these issues. So it’s good for them.

Audience: Shirley, looking back at what happened, is there anything that you would do differently, knowing what you know now?

Lasker: I really don’t think we could have stopped the mall. There was too much money involved, there was a lot of corruption. Personally, I think Paul Adler was the fall guy. He went to jail and he didn’t rat out a lot of other people. I think there were a lot of politicians and planning people involved—our building inspector at the time, our highway superintendent at the time. None of them were touched and Paul Adler took the fall for everybody and now he’s reinstituted himself as a good citizen in the community. And he’s tried to get back into politics, but I’m one of the people who sort of won’t let him. I think people have learned from this experience. We passed a bond in 2000 to save $22 million worth of open space. We signed on to the mayor’s climate protection agreement, we just had an all-day environmental summit. We pledged to have a climate action plan to reduce emissions in Clarkstown by 20% by 2020. We’ve done a lot of things that we might not have done if it hadn’t been for the mall. So I think consciousness has changed in Clarkstown, and in the county, for the better.

Audience: You mentioned in the film that the town where Valenti came from banned malls. What was different about that town, and what can we learn from towns that have succeeded in that way?

Mondale: One thing Kunstler says is that you’re zoning laws are really important, as boring as that sounds, because that’s your vision for your community. He basically says that we all dream of these nostalgic Elm Streets and Main Streets of Leave it to Beaver yore, but in fact our zoning laws don’t allow that to be built in most places in America. You can’t have a corner store in residential. The commercial strip is where the stores go. A lot of it boils down to a community having a vision for itself, and then enforcing that with strict zoning laws and people getting involved. That’s the message of the film for us, you have to get involved, you have to come to those meetings. To us it’s all about democracy, really, people coming out and saying what they want their community to be like and letting their leaders know. People are busy, and they have their lives and they hadn’t really stopped and thought about what their community meant to them before the mall came along. I think it forced people to reexamine that. It couldn’t happen again, I don’t think.

Aronow: I think there’s kind of a shift in paradigms, you might say. I think the planning board, in the past, saw their role as to facilitate development. The suburb was new, they wanted to help businesses come in and go through the process to get approval and to get opened and built. Now it’s a more mature suburb, and it has a stronger identity of what the people want the place to be, and then institute laws to force developers to adhere a bit more to their vision.

Lasker: I’ll say one more thing. We do know have a comprehensive plan that now is a model for the state. A lot of the anti-mall people are now on our zoning boards, our architectural review boards. All of those activists and environmentalists are now involved. And I know they’re boring meetings and they happen at night. But they’re private citizens who care and they take interest in their government, and it makes all the difference.