Hello listeners, it's producer Ben here. Now, we're on our way back from Portugal, where we've just

wrapped up our series of pods about the Nations League. You can only hear them on Spotify,

which is also the case for the Women's World Cup editions of the Offside Rule. Both shows are

totally free. You don't need a premium account. You just need the

Spotify app on your phone or your computer. Anyway, what you're about to listen to is a really

interesting conversation between James Horncastle and the Oscar-winning filmmaker Asif Kepadja,

who came back to the pod to tell us about his new documentary Diego Maradona, which is out in

cinemas in the UK on June the 14th.

Take it away, James.

I see, thank you for coming back to Sears.

18 months, I think. You're in post-production at that time.

I think there was a lot of kind of two and throwing in terms of what you could get signed off.

How did you bring it all together then? How did you convince everyone? Because some of the access you get, some of the voices you hear, it's kind of incredible that you got them all to kind of speak on the record and say what they did. Thank you for having me back. I honestly started this film when I'd heard all these rumours.

I'm like, I'm really not interested in gossip. This is not a tabloid a version. So I don't care who someone slept to from what they got up to. So I honestly went into film thinking, we're never going to deal with this stuff. That's not what it's about. It's about him. It's about his character. It's about, you know, football. But actually, as we got into it, if you get into the Naples story,

if you get into what happened to him in Naples, for me, what became

apparent during the research stage was the turning point. Professionally, was, you know, winning the

World Cup, winning the Skodetto, becomes a god, king of the world. But on a personal level,

it's having this kid. He wants a kid. He wants a son. It's a very Latin thing. He wants a boy. He wants a boy called Diego. And he has a boy called Diego. But then he denies it's his. And it all happens at the same time. So at the point when he's at like the high point of his career, for me, becomes like a turning point where he starts to lie and

denies it. And you can see he's lying in his interviews and something changes in him. For me,

having looked at thousands of hours of material all the way from when he was a kid right the way

up to like last week, you look at it and you go, something's gone in his eyes. Something's,

the light's gone from that point onwards in Naples.

...