THE MAKING OF FASTER: AN INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR MARK NEALE
WHY DID YOU MAKE FASTER?
The simple fact is that nobody has made a film about this sport that does it justice, and there have been some terrible movies that make it look ridiculous. These days it seems the only way Hollywood can imagine a biker movie is as a parody of itself, like ‘Biker Boyz’ or ‘Torque’.
I was made aware of the damage previous movies had done on the day I first walked into the MotoGP paddock, at the IRTA test in Jerez in February 2001. Ian MacLean, FASTER’s Executive Producer, introduced me to Garry Taylor, boss of the Suzuki Team. “Mark’s a film director”, Ian said. “We’re trying to get a racing movie off the ground.” Taylor took a step backward and put up his arms in the sign of the cross, as if I were a vampire. The he uttered the words “Silver Dream Racer.” I have seen that dreadful ‘70s movie. I understood we had an uphill struggle on our hands.
Mostly, though, this film was needed because it didn’t exist and millions of bike fans around the world, like me, wanted it very, very badly. More than that, we wanted the sport we love to be shown in a way that would make all the poor people who have never dragged a knee at 100mph deeply envious. It had to be cool as well as true.
HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO PULL THAT OFF?
Above all, FASTER is an independent film. This is crucial. The world of motorcycling is populated by people with a strong independent streak – you can see it in everyone from Brando in ‘The Wild One’ to Valentino Rossi today. FASTER is a film by, about and for independent-spirited people.
It all started in 1998, in LA, when I met one of the few people in the world capable of getting this project off the ground: Ian MacLean, son of ex- racer Bob MacLean who founded the WCM MotoGP team with Peter Clifford in the early ‘90s. This is the first film Ian’s produced, and thanks to his ability to find independent investment, we didn’t have to go to a studio or a production company for financial help. Ian also put his own credibility on the line when he walked me and the crew into the paddock and introduced us to the likes of Kenny Roberts and Mick Doohan. Happily, now that the film is complete, we can still walk into the paddock, so Ian’s faith in me and the project has been justified. But the bottom line is that, with his help, we were able to make the movie the way we wanted.
We didn’t have a ton of money but we did have creative freedom. There were no committees or corporations telling us what to do. Just like the Grand Prix teams, we had a small, expert crew who have worked together for years and are friends – I’ve worked with editor Rochelle Ford for six years, with director of photography Grant Gee and composers tomandandy for twelve. That’s what it takes. 100% creative drive and no men in suits standing in the way.
IT’S FUNNY YOU WOULD MAKE THIS FILM FROM THE U.S…
I never expected to. In 1997, I left my native England—where motorcycle racing is a big deal and Barry Sheene and Neil Hodgson are household names—and came to Los Angeles, where nobody has a clue who Barry Sheene, Kenny Roberts, Wayne Rainey or any of the other motorcycle gods are, even though many of the gods are American. Of course, there are millions of bikers in the States, but it’s still a relatively underground scene here. Grand Prix motorcycle racing barely shows up on the US sports radar, even though it has hundreds of million of fans around the world. So when my family and I moved to California, nothing was further from my mind than the idea of making a movie about the sport I loved but was sure I had left behind in Europe.
But then, my wife Fiona made friends with Ian MacLean’s wife Tracey, and our kids became friends, and one day I found myself round at the MacLean’s house. I saw the photographs on Ian’s wall and I knew that here, in a house by the beach in Southern California, was the doorway to a world I had always craved access to. Not Hollywood. MotoGP. The first conversation I ever had with Ian was about grand prix racing, and in particular the fact that nobody had ever made a good film about it.
I think it took a couple of years for him to come to terms with the idea that this English bloke with a dodgy haircut and dubious rock’n’roll connections (I had originally come to LA because of my occasionally brilliant career as a music video director) was not going to leave him alone.
YOU’VE ALWAYS BEEN A MOTORCYCLE FAN?
Since I was three, when my grandfather took me for a spin in his mate’s sidecar combo. When I was thirteen, one of my teachers asked me if I was interested in anything other than music and motorcycles, as if these were not enough to sustain a person in life. At the time I felt shamed by my limited interests, but a couple of decades down the road it seems to me that my teenage self had his head screwed on okay. Once I discovered girls, I didn’t really want for anything.
My obsessions with music and motorcycles have never left me. I cannot imagine life without them. So it was only natural, having done what I set out to do as a music video director (it doesn’t get any better than U2), that I should start thinking about making a motorcycle movie. There must be hundreds of directors out there who have had the same idea. But I was lucky enough to be married to a woman who made friends with Tracy MacLean and led me to Ian, and his father, and MotoGP.
WHAT PERIOD DOES FASTER COVER?
We started shooting in June 2001 and stopped in July 2002.
IT TURNED OUT TO BE CRITICAL MOMENT IN THE SPORT, JUST AS A MUCH FASTER
BIKES WERE MAKING THEIR DEBUT ON THE TRACK AND SHATTERING THE 200MPH BARRIER.
BEFORE YOU STARTED THE FILM, DID YOU KNOW HOW SIGNIFICANT THE SWITCH FROM
2-STROKE TO 4-STROKE ENGINES WOULD BE?
I remember a conversation with Ian in January 2002 when it looked like we might not have the money to make the film that year. We considered shelving it until 2003 but it was simply unthinkable. More by luck than judgement, we found ourselves on the cusp of the biggest change to the sport in our lifetimes. We had to capture that. 2002 gave us a unique vantage point, allowing us to look back at the heroes of the 2-stroke era and forward to the 4-stroke age. The 2-strokes were the most brutal race bikes ever built – incredibly hard to master and, I think, destined to enter motorcycle legend as the ultimate test of a rider’s skill and courage. The new 4-strokes are by all accounts more forgiving, but they are also much faster (last year the Ducati hit 206mph at Mugello). In fact they accelerate faster than Formula One cars. They also sound absolutely terrifying – Formula One champ Niki Lauda said of them, “These are not motorcycles. They are hell machines.”
HOW DID YOU GET PERMISSION TO FILM THE MOTO GP?
Ian and I started talking to his father Bob MacLean and his partner Peter Clifford. We wouldn’t have got far without their help. They introduced us to Dorna, the MotoGP rights holders.
As far as Dorna was concerned, we were just another couple of hopefuls talking the talk— they probably get half a dozen proposals for movies every month. But they agreed to let us make a pilot, and we had our first shoot in Spain, at the Catalan Grand Prix in 2001. Two weeks later we showed them a 10-minute test piece and everybody seemed reasonably impressed. After that it was a matter of defining the concept of the film more clearly. We knew that WCM – Red Bull Yamaha – would give us access to shoot their story but we wanted to expand the scope of the movie beyond the one team and the one season.
There was also a strong element of luck to our timing. MotoGP is poised to return to the US and that was at the top of Dorna’s mind when we went to them. (The last time the MotoGP was held in the US was in 1993.)
Dorna saw FASTER as a way to re-introduce the sport to the US. They understood that the movie needed to cover the history and feature the top guys in the sport to do the job in the USA, so our vision of the film was essentially the same: we wanted nothing less than a definitive picture of the sport that would tell the story from Sheene and Roberts to Valentino Rossi and they helped us get the access we needed to accomplish that.
The fact that Dorna is a Spanish company also helped. They’re based in Barcelona, where I lived for three years in the ‘80s (mainly because I wanted to be in a country where I could ride motorcycles in the sunshine all year round). When Bob and Peter first told them that Ian was bringing them a Hollywood director, I don’t think they expected an English guy to show up speaking Catalan. It definitely helped us to get along.
HOW DID YOU DECIDE WHICH RIDERS TO INCLUDE IN THE FILM?
I grew up watching Barry Sheene and Kenny Roberts on TV in the ‘70s and ‘80s and really got into the sport in the Schwantz/Rainey/Doohan years. I saw Sheene and Roberts as the pioneers of grand prix racing as we know it — knees down, rear wheel sliding and all that. I knew that all the current riders know their history and would enjoy talking about Sheene and his peers as much as the older guys would about the current stars. That was the time frame I had in mind.
After that, it was simply a matter of going after them. The only person I didn’t interview in person was Barry Sheene, because I was shooting Kevin Schwantz the same week in California and was also in the middle of editing. I talked to Barry a few times on the phone, e-mailed him some questions, and then sent a two-man crew round to his house in London the day after the British Grand Prix in 2002. He’d been celebrating his win in the classic race at Donington the night before, but he did a totally professional job of interviewing himself. I think he got the cancer diagnosis a couple of weeks later. FASTER wouldn’t be the same without him, just as the world is not. What a star.
WAS IT HARD GETTING THE INTERVIEWS? GUYS LIKE ROSSI AND BIAGGI ARE SUCH HUGE
STARS…
Nobody refused. I was amazed at how open and helpful everybody was. Obviously the further you go up the ladder the harder it gets, though. We had several abortive attempts at interviews with Biaggi and the first time I got a proper interview with Rossi was at our final Grand Prix shoot, Catalunya 2002. So all through the production there was a gnawing anxiety that we might end up with a ‘hollow’ film, loaded with former champions, mechanics, truck drivers and riders’ girlfriends, but lacking the center of the current stars. This is where Dorna came to the rescue. If it wasn’t for them I think I’d still be waiting outside Valentino’s motor home.
HAD YOU EVER MET ANY OF THE FORMER CHAMPIONS BEFORE?
No. I think this was an advantage. They didn’t know what to expect from me and that gave the conversations a bit of an edge. These guys get interviewed all the time so I tried to introduce an element of novelty and talk to them in situations which would help animate them, the most obvious example being driving around race tracks in cars rigged with micro cameras.
WHAT WERE YOUR MOST MEMORABLE EXPERIENCES WITH THE RIDERS?
The scariest moment for me personally involved Rossi. I was shooting him testing a rally car, standing on the outside of a corner, which he was taking faster and faster each lap, drifting wider and wider and closer to me each time. I was just thinking to myself that it was time to move back when he came skidding past and collided with a tree a few yards away. It’s at times like this that you realise that unfettered access isn’t necessarily a good thing. You want to get close to these guys but you don’t want to get too close.
Max Biaggi was the most unusual interviewee. He prefers to disregard the interviewer and focus on the camera, as if to hypnotise or seduce the audience he perceives inside it. Grant Gee, who was operating the camera, told me later, “That was very strange. I felt like he was flirting with me.”
My favourite moment was talking to John Hopkins just after he’d grabbed pole position at Catalunya in only his sixth GP. It was an amazing performance from a 19 year-old rookie on an inferior bike. Everybody in the garage lit up with excitement. It was a moment of truth, a little bit of history – the lap that announced him as a true contender.
YOU SAW A FEW ACCIDENTS, TOO…
I have to admit that I started getting worried about interviewing Garry McCoy after a few months, because it seemed like we might be jinxing him. Look at the record: we arranged to shoot at the 2001 Catalan Grand Prix and he broke his wrist a month before. We stopped shooting for a few months and he recovered. In pre-season tests in early 2002 he was the fastest guy out there. As soon as we organised our first shoot of 2002, he fell off and broke his leg. The leg got worse as we continued shooting. He made a complete recovery once we stopped. He was free of injury for the entire 2003 season, when we were not shooting. Then, in December 2003, we arranged to interview him in Andorra (the first shoot of FASTER 2). When I arrived, he had his arm in a sling. He’d just fallen off his SuperMoto bike and fractured it.
The worst moment was when we were in the commentary booth filming Julian Ryder and Toby Moody during qualifying in Japan and Garry went down. We could see him lying on the track and I heard Toby say, “he’s not moving.” After all that we’d seen McCoy go through, this was almost too much to bear. I felt like putting the cameras down and weeping. But then McCoy climbed off the stretcher and limped back to the garage. A few minutes later we were shooting him talking to his mechanics and life was back to normal.
It’s never really normal, though. Moments like that are always lurking just beneath the surface—the spectre of the rider lying motionless on a cold, windy track, the flipside of the rock’n’roll glamour and speed.
YOU COVERED A LOT OF DIFFERENT PEOPLE IN THE FILM…
I interviewed over seventy people, twenty or so of them several times, and ended up with over 700 pages of transcripts.
In addition to the riders, I wanted to create a sense of this self-contained world populated by all kinds of people doing all kinds of jobs: doctors, photographers, mechanics, truck drivers, girlfriends, relatives, helmet technicians, track workers, fans – all human life is there, and every language under the sun, and most of the time everybody gets on. It’s a beautiful thing.
ONE OF THE MORE FASCINATING CHARACTERS YOU COVER IS DR. COSTA…
It was a name I had heard for years. Dr. Costa is a mythical figure in the paddock (and delights in adding to the mythology himself). He inspires all manner of opinions. Some teams won’t let their riders near him. Others, like Rossi, clearly regard him as a talisman
as much as a physician.
I once asked Dr. Costa whether he had any children. He gestured to the riders in the clinic at that moment (no serious injuries, incidentally) and said, “These are my children.” There is no doubt that he is an extraordinary father figure—the kind of father many of us would like to have: one who encourages you to attempt feats of reckless daring, then consoles and patches you up when you fall. Whatever you think of Costa, the MotoGP world would be a very different place without him. Much more than a medicine man, he is in some sense the guiding spirit of MotoGP. It’s a death-defying sport and nobody knows more about helping the riders defy death than Costa.
YOU EVEN INCLUDED JOURNALISTS. OF THE HUNDREDS WHO COVER THE SPORT AROUND
THE WORLD, HOW DID YOU DECIDE WHICH TO INTERVIEW?
I went after the people whose work I knew and liked. I grew up reading Michael Scott and Julian Ryder, and when you go after Julian you automatically get the inimitable Toby Moody, his commentating cohort. The bottom line is that these guys are very entertaining and they are passionate about the sport, but they’re in the movie as citizens of the Grand Prix world as well as media professionals.
WHAT WERE THE PARTICULAR CHALLENGES THAT CAME WITH FILMING FASTER?
Time – you have to plan every element of every shoot with military efficiency because nobody will wait for you if you are not ready. Noise—it’s constant and deafening and makes it hard to think straight. Weather—always either searingly hot or freezing or wet. Jetlag—you’re in each place for a few days and each place is a very long way from the next place. In other words, we went through what the inhabitants of the MotoGP world go through: life in a very noisy small town that moves countries every couple of weeks. The challenge was to maintain a coherent idea of the film and to remain aware of what we wanted to capture amid the organised chaos that we were moving through.
WAS THERE ANYBODY IN PARTICULAR WHO HELPED YOU ALONG?
Everybody in the paddock helped, that was the great thing. But there’s somebody outside the MotoGP world who got involved late in the day and made a huge difference: Ewan McGregor. I had him in mind to narrate the movie from the beginning – I knew he was a genuine bike nut and I thought he’d be into the film. However, it’s one thing thinking you’ll go and ask Ewan McGregor to narrate your film and another actually finding a way to him. The last thing his agents and managers want is for their megastar to go anywhere near nasty, dangerous motorcycles, so you have to find a way round them. In the end, after months of failed attempts, I found someone who was a friend of a friend of his, and through him I managed to get a rough cut of the film to Ewan, who was in Alabama shooting ‘Big Fish’. This was in February 2003, by which time I had been telling Dorna and everybody else for months that I was going to get Ewan McGregor to be the narrator, and I was getting very, very worried that I was going to come unstuck. Anyhow, I sent him the video by FedEx and resigned myself to a lengthy wait. The next day I got home and there was a message on the phone from someone who sounded like Valentino Rossi after a few drinks: “Mark,” the voice squawked, “I watcha the film, is a-very nice, I like very much, is a-very fast –“ Then the voice changed pitch and accent and said, “Mark, it’s Ewan McGregor, I love the movie and I want to do the narration.” A week later we were recording him in Boutwell Studios, Birmingham, Alabama, and a month after that the movie was finished, complete with movie star narrator.
On top of that, Ewan took time off from his official duties at the Cannes Film Festival, where he was promoting the excellent ‘Young Adam’, to ride along the Croisette with a gang of MotoGP riders on race bikes (Rossi, McCoy, Capirossi, Hopkins, Edwards, Jacque, Hoffman). We made an incredible amount of noise and burnt rubber past the grand hotels full of gawping Hollywood execs in what the movie press hailed as one of the best publicity stunts the festival has ever seen.
Ewan has done all this for love of the movie and love of bikes – and certainly not for the money. It’s impossible to predict how successful FASTER will be, but there’s no doubt that having him involved has made a big difference to its chances. More than that, having him involved has been a blast. He really seems to enjoy the opportunity to get inside MotoGP, and everyone at FASTER and in the sport is happy he’s there. Thanks, mate.
WHAT FORMAT DID YOU SHOOT IN?
We used a variety of formats: 16mm, High Definition, DV Cam, Super 8. We shot over two hundred hours of our own material. To this we added six hours of Dorna footage culled from dozens of tapes in a separate editing session in Barcelona.
EDITING ALL THAT MATERIAL MUST HAVE BEEN A BIG JOB…
We edited at Avenue Edit in Los Angeles for six months, six days a week, ten hours a day. At the start of the job my editor Rochelle Ford knew nothing about motorcycle racing. Now she knows more than the most hardcore fans. We were together throughout the edit and, amazingly enough, we never had an argument.
HAVE YOU HEARD ANY REACTIONS TO THE FILM FROM PEOPLE YOU INTERVIEWED?
I ran into Kenny Roberts (The King) at the British grand prix in 2003. He said, “ I heard your movie was a piece of crap but I’ve just seen it and it’s not that bad.” Other people have been even nicer about it than Kenny.
WHAT ABOUT DORNA?
We’re working on FASTER 2 with them now, so I think they like it.
LAST QUESTION…WHAT DO YOU RIDE?
Anything I can. I kept hoping someone would offer me a spin on a MotoGP bike while we were filming but it never happened. I have a BMW 1150GS in LA, which is a great all-rounder and surprisingly quick in the canyons - very good for embarrassing sport bike riders.
I was a motorcycle courier in London for a year in the early ’80s and
for a while I held the company record for getting a package from the City
to Heathrow airport (a little under 25 minutes, on a clapped-out Honda CX500).
I’d rather my own son became a racer than a despatch rider. I’m
amazed I survived.