‘You are the dog in space’: inside Asif Kapadia’s new VR short, Laika

With his new animation, the Oscar-winning documentary maker - and former VR cynic - is exploring how the technology might revolutionise the way we experience cinema

We would have to build a car, that's the only way it would work," says Asif Kapadia, brainstorming how to recreate the unforgettable opening passage of his movie Diego Maradona, in virtual reality. You know what an LED lightbox is? It's the new version of green screen, a wall of tiny little lights, thousands of them. So you create whatever you want, you put it on that wall, and it projects. We'd have to take every location of Naples in the 80s, put that on a light box, build a car, then put us in the car driving so that when you look out of the window you see Naples. I mean, it would be great. But you'd have to build every environment and that ..." he whispers, is why it's so expensive."

Over the course of the pandemic, Kapadia has been keeping busy. He directed a miniseries on the subject of mental health starring Oprah and Prince Harry, and a history of music in the year 1971 inspired by David Hepworth's hit book. He produced an Indian drama series for Amazon about a shaman on the run who joins forces with a local cop. He's building up to his next big doc thing", a story he says is to do with space travel, confronts all the mad shit going on right now" and means he's going fully dystopian". He has also made a film showing at the London film festival (LFF) right now; a VR short about Laika, the first earthling to orbit Earth.