Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into covering MotoGP and how you got into filmmaking.
The job I’ve been doing over the last fifteen years… I’ve made five of these films. So that job’s open to anybody. I saw a gap in the market for this kind of film, so I went after it. It was through meeting people who were involved that I got into MotoGP. Before that I came to live in America in 1998, because I was mostly directing music videos then, and I worked with some quite big bands like U2 and The Verve Pipe and Live. But then I was looking to do different things and this is something I love. I’ve always loved racing motorcycles. I’ve always ridden bikes. I grew up next to a racetrack in the country in the south of England. So from when I was eight years old I was hanging out at a racetrack. This was an opportunity to combine all those things. Having a background in music and music videos is another thing that I kind of draw on heavily. The music is very important in the films. Everybody uses music in films but I particularly like that part of it. So these movies are a way of combining my skills. And the other weird coincidence is that I went and lived in Barcelona for three years in the mid ‘80s, so I learned Spanish and I learned Catalan. And the sport is run in Barcelona. They’re not just Spanish, but they’re basically Catalans who run MotoGP. So if you speak their language, that’s been a big help.

From the outside, MotoGP riders seem to be very protective and tow the company line when needed, but in other cases they seem very open and can even engage in some trash talk or whatever. How hard was it to get them to open up for this documentary?
I would say it’s becoming harder to get them away from their handlers and their teams. That’s something that you have to do. So once you’re talking to them away from the track or in a situation like in a car where there’s no managers there or whoever, it’s easier. But it involves a lot of hanging around at tracks and it involves a lot of kind of scheming and planning to get somewhere else to talk to them. So it’s tough. I think the ones with strong personalities are not afraid to talk openly. In general they have got strong personalities. They’ve all got their agendas so it’s a really big part of it, that’s all I can say. It’s figuring out how to talk to them, when to talk to them, and how to push them to open up. I don’t know any particular kind of secrets on how to do it but persistence is the thing. A lot of it is just being really kind of stubborn and just spending a lot of time and everything. Plus, most of them have seen the other films so in general they like what I’ve done before, so that helps.

It’s that line: pushing it, crossing it a bit, getting away with it, and sometimes not getting away with it.

The six riders that are featured in this film—Jorge Lorenzo, Marc Marquez, Dani Pedrosa, Casey Stoner, Valentino Rossi and Marco Simoncelli —their backgrounds differ a lot from one another, as well as their personalities. How important was it for you to capture that?
I think the relationship between fathers and sons is obviously a very simple dimension that makes it accessible to people in general. So the fact that Paolo Simoncelli and Marco Simoncelli were so close that he [the father] went to every single race that Marco ever did, made that a very obvious, but strong storyline. The fathers and the sons idea obviously applies to Valentino Rossi and to Marc Marquez as well. Basically you’re always looking for a way in to each character’s story. The family is obviously something everybody can kind of relate to. So that was a starting point. I didn’t do it with Stoner because I couldn’t, but Stoner gave us a lot of his time. Casey was the one guy that I interviewed together with Brad Pitt because we both wanted to know more about why he quit and what was going on. So that was the last thing we filmed. In February of this year we did a Skype interview with Casey. It was me and Brad talking to him. That was pretty bizarre for me. I’ve got to say, that was the one situation where I felt like I was hallucinating. Here’s Brad Pitt talking to Casey Stoner on a computer! It was crazy!

The guy you want to hear most from is the rider. And then the people around them who are close to them all give you a different point of view. The team managers will give you interesting comments but you’ve got to hear from the dad or the mom as well. It starts to feel real and it starts to feel true when you've got at least two or three different points of view on a given person or subject. Dani Pedrosa is interesting because he’s so kind of self-contained. I didn’t include his dad or his family because in the end it didn’t feel necessary. It felt like with some of them you want to show the family stuff more. Paolo Simoncelli’s the obvious example. But Dani, what I felt about him, he’s such a strong and intelligent and philosophical person, and he communicated very well just for himself. So each of them is different.

You did cover the death of Marco heavily with different angles—with his father and the riders. How difficult was that to get? Did you have a point of reference going into it, how you wanted to form the story?
Obviously it’s there at the beginning because when we started making the film Marco was already dead. The last film went up until the end of 2010; this one was going to cover 2011 and ’12 and ’13. So I knew going in that I had to deal with that. I didn’t know exactly how, but the most important thing was to talk through it with the people closest to it, which means Marco’s father, Paolo, and obviously Colin Edwards and Valentino Rossi who were directly involved in the accident. And then what you show and how much of it you show really came from showing it to other people. The overall challenge was to explain it enough without showing it to an awfully graphic degree. You can’t just show it once and bang and it’s gone. Most people would then say, what happened? Why did he crash? Why did he fall in front of the other riders? So I just feel like you had to explain it but then you had to keep it as limited as you could. I edited that probably ten different ways. There’s a lot more to it than just showing what happened. It’s to do with the emotional impact of it, trying to in some way communicate what it felt like without being over the top about it. So, for example, what the music does there and the sound does is obviously very calculated. But it was horrible to do. It was horrible to edit. It was horrible talking to Paolo. He can’t talk anymore because he was starting to cry. It’s really difficult.

As a filmmaker do you have people that are close to you that you run this stuff through just to get a different perspective on it?
Yeah, in the first place there’s obviously Brad Pitt and there were three other producers at his company, two women and one man. None of them knew the sport. Brad knows the sport but the others didn’t. So they didn’t understand, but in general that’s the kind of thing that I like to do. I show it to my wife’s friends, women, housewives in Los Angeles who haven’t got a clue. Then you show it to a few other friends. But mostly it does come down to me and Brad and there’s always another editor, or nearly always. I do a lot of the editing myself but there’s always another editor as well. A lot of it you just know what works as a film. So there’s no committee decision. You have to decide for yourself in the end.

In our industry, there’s a lot of aspiring filmmakers out there. Can you explain how this process comes together, when you’re committing this much time and this much effort into a documentary?
In the first place, I always want to do something better than what I’ve done before. With this one, I went to more of an extreme than ever of taking a really long time editing. The big thing with this is the amount of time I spent editing. I haven’t added it up but I was like 500 days, 500 ten-hour days, 5,000 hours editing. And probably half of that was on my own. So you’ve got to be able to do that. That’s a huge part of it. MTV wanted to do a series about Nicky Hayden a few years ago. It was going to be a big deal. It was going to be like a Nitro Circus kind of idea but it was MotoGP and Nicky Hayden and it was the year after he won the world championship. Apart from the fact that his year wasn’t very good, somebody told me they shot over 1,000 hours of material and they just completely lost control of it in the edit. So the first thing is you’ve got to be able to edit and you’ve got to be able to work with huge amounts of material. This is made from over 600 hours of material. A ton of it I have extracted from MotoGP’s archives. So that’s a huge part of it. Then there’s the filming of it, which these days you can do so much cool stuff. You can shoot action and slow motion way better than when I started 15 years ago when I made Faster. Obviously the other big thing is how much time and money do you want to spend on it relative to what you expect to make from it at the end? And that’s the hardest thing. It’s taken me 15 years to kind of build up an audience and be confident that this one will at least pay for itself. So there’s no simple answer. I think what’s enticing about it is what you can do. If you’ve got a camera and a computer to edit with you can make great stuff and that’s very exciting. But how you make that into a two-hour movie, that’s difficult. You’ve got to have a good story to make a long film.