Diego Maradona is sure to cause a stir when he turns up next week at the Cannes film festival for a new documentary about his jaw-dropping life by the Oscar-winning maker of “Amy”.
It is only one of a wave of new works about the flawed Argentine football genius that include a just-wrapped Amazon biopic series that follows every step of his dramatic rise and fall.
The poster for Asif Kapadia’s striking documentary Diego Maradona also pulls no punches, calling him both hero and a “hustler”.
Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bono and Iggy Pop will climb the same carpet during the festival, which starts on Tuesday, but few if any of them can draw the crowds or the passion as the short man born in a Buenos Aires shantytown.
It is this complex yet unshakable adoration, forged in Maradona’s frequent flirtations with death, that drew Kapadia to his story.
Tough call
After his acclaimed portrait of the Brazilian Formula One ace Ayrton Senna, the filmmaker said he had to steel himself to tackle another sporting hero who lived life on the edge.
Despite swearing never to make another sports film after Senna , Kapadia caved in when he discovered a cache of footage from Maradona’s mythic period playing for Napoli. “It was infamous,” he told a documentary conference in Copenhagen earlier this year, with some sequences showing the player partying with dons from the Camorra, the Neopolitan mafia.
“We managed to get our hands on them and thought, ‘He is really interesting and his journey is incredible.’ What he gets up to, and what happens to him, has much wider themes,” Kapadia said.
Maradona also agreed to talk, sitting down for three long interviews because “he liked Senna . That was one of the reasons we were able to get through the door.”
