MotoGP Blog

An Interview with Mark Neale

FASTER is a movie that captures a seminal moment in the evolution of the modern MotoGP era. It follows the paddock and the teams, and particularly Red Bull Yamaha, through the transition from 500cc two-stroke monsters to fire-breathing four-strokes, pulling in a cast of characters from old hands Sheene and Roberts, new boys McCoy and Hopkins, and Biaggi and Rossi at the height of their feud.

FASTER is now available to download from the US iTunes store, and MotoGPBlog caught up with director Mark Neale in July 2008, to talk bikes, MotoGP and about the making of FASTER. The film is a knowledgeable yet inclusive look at the sport of Grand Prix motorcycle racing, and the director’s enthusiasm and understanding of the sport comes through in the quality of the final product; it could only be made by someone with a passion for motorcycles.

“I have a BMW GS1150 which I have had for 8 years now. I got it in 2000 and it’s fantastic. It’s really good for around [California] because the distances are so big, and with it being earthquake country the roads are kind of messed up, so it’s great for all purposes. I ride it every day - it’s my transport. It’s weird because you would imagine more people would ride motorcycles out here in LA, but they prefer to sit in their cars. Sometimes at the weekends I’ll go and do a couple of hundred miles up in the canyons.”

MotoGP has always been a keen interest for Neale, and he was at the race at Laguna Seca this year.

“There hasn’t been a really good race [at Laguna] in the last few years. Everyone was hoping it would be good, but nobody was expecting what we got. I was up at the Corkscrew. We watched the start at the start[line], and saw [Rossi running onto the gravel at the Corkscrew and pushing himself and Stoner wide] on one of the big screens as we walked up the hill. But it didn’t matter where you were because of the atmosphere and the crowd going nuts - it was just brilliant! We got up [to the Corkscrew] at about lap 4 through to the end of the race. I was standing next to a Spanish guy when Lorenzo came off. I found myself consoling this Spaniard who was virtually in tears because of Lorenzo - he kind of just collapsed!”

Despite the obvious enthusiasm Neale has for motorcycles and racing, and his history in film and TV, directing music videos for the likes of U2, getting FASTER off the ground was far from simple.

“FASTER was a dream project in that way, because I have always ridden bikes. I’ve never raced; the only time I have made money riding was being a motorcycle courier in London for a year back in the mid-80’s. Apart from that, I have always followed racing and been into it. When I was living in London, I was doing TV programmes and directing music videos, and at the time I thought it would be brilliant to do something like FASTER, but didn’t have any connections or any people who I could convince to do it.

It was only when I came out here [to LA], quite by chance I met the guy who became my business partner in it, a guy called Ian MacLean. Ian’s dad Bob, who pops up in FASTER, was the co-owner of the Red Bull Yamaha racing team with Peter Clifford.

It was 1998 and Ian didn’t know me from Adam, and I found out that his dad had his team. It then took a good two years to convince those guys that this might be a good project for them and for the sport, and to cut a long story short, eventually I went to an IRTA test in Jerez in 2001 and met the Dorna people. I used to live an Barcelona so I speak Spanish and Catalan and that really helped talking to them, because you have to do a lot of talking to them to get anywhere with anything.

So it involved a huge amount of talking to Dorna and finding ways to raise the money to do it. It was three years before we got going and it was just by the skin of our teeth that we managed to start shooting - and it was wonderful: just at the end of the 500 era and all of that stuff was still alive in people’s minds. People like Wayne Rainey and Kevin Schwantz weren’t too far away in time, even Barry Sheene and Kenny Roberts were around.

It was great to get time with Barry Sheene as it may have been the last proper interview that he ever gave; I think it was a week later that I remember reading he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. So we were very lucky to get all of that stuff. All I can say is that I saw a chance [to make FASTER] and I just went for it. Looking back I spent a good five years of my life between getting that thing going and doing it, finishing it and getting it in cinemas and selling it and everything. So it has been a lot of work but it’s good.”

FASTER is part documentary, part fairytale, part white-knuckle ride. It shows the action and the MotoGP world very much from the point of view of those on the front line of the MotoGP war. This is something Neale was aiming for from the start.

“It just seemed the more I could tell the story from the point of view of the people doing it, and if I could have a few great characters to tell that story with, especially at that time Rossi, Biaggi, Garry McCoy and John Hopkins, who show different sides of the sport. McCoy being this strangely gifted but very unusual character who had some bad luck, and Hopkins who represents the hopes and aspirations of a new guy coming into it very young.

It was great to have them. I always wanted to tell it as stories, tell it through the characters, and give it as much atmosphere to it, a sense of the MotoGP paddock as a place, and characters like Dr Costa who I’d read about all my life. I remember seeing references to Costa and thinking ‘Who is this guy?’ He’s just brilliant because he is the sort of loving father and crazy witch doctor character. He is really exactly the right spokesman for the sport, in that he gives you that mythical feeling of the riders are in some ways like gods, and at some point they have to return to the world of men.”

We dwell on Dr. Costa for a moment; his eccentric, philosopher style, his approach to treating the riders. He is a figure Neale obviously has enormous respect and a large degree of affection for.

“The way he describes [the riders] as ‘their blood containing drops of Dyonisian madness’; there is only so much you can have of that, but it is very true that there is that degree of passion which crosses the line into crazy obsession, which makes it all so great. They are god-like death-defying figures, they are men trying to be super-men.

I knew Costa was there, and half the people in the paddock said ‘Oh you don’t want to go near him, he’s completely nuts’, and I just thought he was great. You can see that the riders love him, and he loves them, and you can see that in a lot of different ways in the paddock; even in the relationships between the mechanics and the riders, there is that sense of how devoted many of them are to each other, and none more than he.

There is also the question of just how wise is it to shoot people up with, say, ten times the recommended dose of painkillers, so we always tried [in FASTER] to give a sense of ’some poeple think like this’ but I also think that Costa is absolutely genuine when he says that ‘I don’t ever try to make them do it, I have to see what they want to do and see if I can help them’, and sometimes he does say no.

In his waiting room/office part of the Clinica Mobile I remember seeing the complete works of Friedrich Nietzsche…and a pinball machine! That tells you a lot about him. I knew there was this great cast of characters and it was a case of getting in there and telling as much of their story as I could.”

Of all of the characters on display, one group stands out as the perhaps unexpected stars of the show - the Yamaha Red Bull driver/mechanics.

“They are like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: characters on the side who observe it all with a good sense of humour but they really know their stuff as well. They are really entertaining and you know you are getting it from the horse’s mouth when they tell you their stories. I always wanted to do that, to get a sense of how the teams work, but unfortunately the most outrageous things they told me were always off-camera. The one subject that you would always get on to with all of them at some point was the lady-boys in Malaysia! Basically quite a few healthy young men have been shocked to find out that the girls they were chatting up turned out not to be girls! They are great characters and they have every right to be in the film and they work so hard and see and know so much.”

FASTER was filmed between June 2001 and July 2002, and in that time Neale and his team spent a lot of time in the paddock. The Red Bull mechanics antics give the impression that the paddock is a lively, happy place - hard work but enjoyable at the same time. In reality, life in this high pressure environment is not always as straightforward as that.

“I think there is always a lot of anxiety. It’s true on one level that everyone does get on, but there is a lot of competition for the good jobs. Not just the riders, but the crew. You get the feeling there is an Italian mafia and a Spanish mafia, and there are a lot of people who work on teams that won’t necessarily ever get a chance to be in some of the teams because they are not Spanish or Italian.

There are also several teams that have a hard time keeping going financially and I have heard from a few people about not getting paid, or only getting paid twice in a year rather than six times, or just getting paid half of what you should be paid. That’s not a lot of people, but definitely happens. There is that side to it; it’s not all plain sailing for a lot of those guys. And then you have the upper reaches - not just the riders but crew chiefs and team directors are making a lot of money. It’s a pretty mixed up world in some ways.”

The movie would not have been complete without focusing on the Rossi - Biaggi rivalry, which was at it’s peak during filming and is captured brilliantly in the “mosquito-bite” press conference after the two of them had been scrapping on the stairs up to the press room.

“[Rossi] seems to really enjoy that sort of a battle, not necessarily in a sadistic way, but in a gleeful way. I think it plays to his strengths because he is psychologically so tough. I think he really enjoys playing mental games with people with the object with winning the championship, it’s not pure malice or anything like that, but I do think that gives him a real edge when it’s someone really, really good.

I don’t know that he ever felt Hayden threatened him, but Biaggi, Gibernau and Stoner are all that good that it does seem to have a real effect on him. Obviously he had problems with the bike in ‘05 and ‘06 and last year. This year looks like a good one, because Stoner is so fast, and how is it that he can be so fast on that bike and nobody else seems to be able to ride it? And [Stoner] cracked. You know, I haven’t seen [the race at Laguna] yet, so I don’t know exactly what happened, but from what I have read, it was like pure frustration. He could not figure out how to beat Rossi and he ended up running off.”

FASTER is not the only MotoGP movie Neale has directed, the other being The Doctor, The Tornado and the Kentucky Kid which focuses on the race weekend in Laguna Seca in the year that MotoGP returned to the USA. There are more motorcycle-based projects in the pipeline.

“I told Rossi in Laguna, if you ever want the Rossi film, I’d love to talk to you about it. Obviously lots of people are going to be trying to approach him about that, but now he is managing himself I hope he’ll maybe think about it. At the moment he just seems to be into racing and living his life but at the same time you want to say to him: ‘Think of yourself in 20 years time - wouldn’t it be nice to have a really good document that shows how you lived and what you did, not just old races to watch?’ So I’m going to keep going after that one but don’t hold you breath!

I’ve also written a script for a feature film so we hope to make the motorcycle version of the John Frankenheimer Grand Prix movie - not the same, but the idea of making a very authentic movie set in a motorcycle world championship. It’s been three or four years to write the script and different versions of it. I have been doing this with Ewan McGregor, and so over the last year I have got that to the point where he really, really likes it and we are in the process of talking to Hollywood producers and studios and looking at different ways to get together a large amount of money to make the movie.

Other than that, over the last year or so I have been working on a documentary about the Lollapalooza Music Festival, so I’m going to Chicago next week to shoot that.”

Our conversation turns back to current events in MotoGP and the idea that, over the last twelve months or so, Rossi has too much power in the sport. Neale is clear in his assessment of this.

“I’m not sure that he has too much power. If it produces racing like we had this weekend [at Laguna] then it’s OK. But it is true that the bosses of Dorna do give him whatever he wants. It is not a fair world, that whole world is not fair. Maybe Garry McCoy could not have ridden a 990, maybe he was just a 500 guy, but perhaps that also had something to do with the fact he was Australian and not kind of cool and Italian with lots of sponsors. He was so gifted, and I remember seeing Max Biaggi at the end of 2003 when I had heard McCoy was definitely without a ride and Biaggi saying ‘That’s wrong, he’s one of the top five and he should be here.’ It is really not fair, and a lot of us forget that you just think that that’s racing and they’re all lucky, but a lot of them have a hard time.”

This is the picture of the riders FASTER leaves us with: lucky, but sometimes struggling; crazily obsessed, but always sublimely talented.

Buy FASTER from Amazon.com
Buy FASTER from Amazon.co.uk
Download FASTER from the US iTunes store.