Behind the scenes with 'Idols': MotoGP's 'F1' movie launching this week

This press conference has been going on all morning. By my reckoning I’ve asked my question 16-17 times. I’m surrounded by ‘journalists’ all wearing last season’s credentials. At the back of a dark, low-ceilinged room stands a row of video cameras and operators but none of the equipment is switched on or works. The ‘riders’ in front of us are, well, theatrical. When Matteo Paolillo, as MotoGP racer Andrea Godano, scolds the assembled media as ‘pieces of s**t’, then it feels like an alternative universe (although it’s possible a few real grand prix stars would like to air a similar opinion sometimes).

Other than the performance factor, the set for two scenes in the new MotoGP movie, Idols, is real enough. Today’s pages of the script are being filmed in the basement of an abandoned pharmaceutical office on the outskirts of Valencia, in the autumn of 2024.

Wardrobe, make-up, and catering occupy other floors of the deserted building. British director, Mat Whitecross, he of Oasis Supersonic and Coldplay A Headful of Dreams documentaries fame as well as other features like The Road to Guantánamo, buzzes around coaxing more takes and more deliveries from the actors, one of whom is clearly in the press conference for his physical resemblance to Miguel Oliveira, and more collaboration from the lighting and camera staff.

Personnel roam the set and rebuke the extras for their overenthusiastic reaction to a cutting piece of press conference dialogue by actor Paolillo. “Guys! Look, here is a real MotoGP journalist,” one of the floor managers says and a few heads turn in my direction as I slide down in my chair. “He’s not going ‘oooooh’ is he?!” In the second separate scene in the afternoon, Oscar Casas, the troubled protagonist of the film as Moto2 ace Edu Serra, gets into a fight with a prickly team-mate.

Maybe not quite MotoGP then…but Idols can lay claim to being the first and more realistic feature set around the world championship to date. The film is an independent production between Spanish and Italian companies but is powered and distributed by the might of Warner Bros Spain. Whitecross brings a cool, young dynamic to the story of a Moto2 underdog (Serra) who gets his shot at MotoGP stardom but must first patch up relations with his estranged father/trainer while also falling in love with Luna (played by Spanish singer Ana Mena).

Importantly, Idols benefits from the full support of Dorna/MotoGP, which meant copious access to events, riders, machinery and onboard camera and race footage; much in the same way that Brad Pitt’s F1 vehicle provided eye-catching immersion into Formula 1. The crew also aligned with Jorge Martinez ‘Aspar’, whose Moto3 and Moto2 championship-winning squad enabled expertise and resources and acted as the basis of Serra’s team, while the Pramac outfit helped with his MotoGP wildcard bow.

Considering filming was completed during 2024, it means that Serra’s real-life ‘double’ was none other than world champion Jorge Martín. Idols was shot in 10 weeks in and around Barcelona and Valencia and at grands prix in the USA, Italy, Spain and Japan and seven grand prix circuits.

It may look like Idols is piggybacking the F1 juggernaut but production pre-dated Pitt’s money-spinner. The germs stretch back almost a decade thanks to the curiosity and the will of writer and producer Jordi Gasull, who has numerous and diverse credits to his CV but whose knowledge and fandom of motorcycle racing was alien territory. The Spaniard’s account of the film’s origins shows how fantastically unpredictable and frustrating the genesis of a project can be.

“I didn’t care about motorcycles but 10 years ago a friend of a friend of my nephew introduced me to a girl that was crazy about them, and her best friend was living close to [MotoGP Legend] Jorge Lorenzo. She could get access to his environment…and I started to read about Jorge and thought ‘there’s a great documentary here…’,” he explains. “I was in contact with his manager at the time, Albert Valera, and then onto Dorna. They said they liked the idea of the documentary but they’d seen my other films and felt I could bring a story to the MotoGP world. This was in 2015. Long before the F1 boom.

“Through a friend at Telefonica, we started to develop a TV series that was like [HBO’s] Entourage until finally Telefonica pulled out of MotoGP. That was around 2017 so I tried some other channels but they did not have the TV rights to MotoGP and there were conflicts of interest. I thought it was never going to happen. I put it on the shelf until one day I saw the film Rocky and thought ‘I need to do that for the bikes’ and then I watched Creed and believed there was a chance of doing a modern twist.

“I met with Warners in 2019 and the head of the company at that time was really enthusiastic. We started to develop the possibility of a movie. I was then introduced through another friend to Jorge Martinez and I explained that I needed a team. We went through what I had in mind and he said: ‘I am going to help you…’. At that point, it became a reality…but then the pandemic happened and everything stopped!”

“When we could think about the project again, the F1 movie had been confirmed, and I feared everyone would think we were just copying,” he goes on. “That’s life! I went back to Dorna and they had other offers, which I couldn’t believe! I asked them for a chance, especially as I had been dealing with them for years already and they agreed to back me. It has been a long, long journey.”

Whitecross brings international and artistic credence to Idols. Any concerns over communication with the Spanish crew were nixed by the London-based Brit’s bilingual language skills, courtesy of his Argentine mother. The 48-year-old previously worked with award-winning director Michael Winterbottom. “He literally used to ride his motorbike into the office every day to protect it,” Whitecross explains. “He was obsessed and it started my interest.”

“I knew of the ‘greats’ and I would watch MotoGP from time to time but it was not like it’s football in the UK,” he adds. “When I came on board, my first question was ‘why me?’ but when I started doing my research, I became a bit obsessed by it. As most MotoGP fans will know, it is one of the most exciting sports on the planet and one of the most visual, so cinematically it was a no-brainer. As soon as we started talking, I thought ‘where has this sport been all my life?’ So, I’m very glad they did ask me.”

Whitecross had two significant tasks: to effectively tell Gasull’s father/son and love story but then also try to portray the sensory ‘hit’ of MotoGP that made such an impact on his first trackside visit. “Sachsenring 2022, and I’d never seen – or heard – anything like it before,” he remembers of the scouting trip to Germany. “We were in the car on the way to the circuit and I could hear the noise and feel it in my chest. It was extraordinary. I’d been to many music gigs in my life and you have that sensation when you are close to the speakers…but this was a whole different level.”

Gasull knew he needed to establish credibility and to maximise the opportunity afforded by Dorna and the likes of Aspar, Pramac and figures like Marc Márquez. “I spoke to a lot of people in the paddock: riders, family of riders, management, media, Dorna people. I was hanging around the paddock from 2018 until 2023, dealing with Jorge Lorenzo, Fabio Quartararo and younger riders that would be very important for the movie, like [Moto3 world champions] David Alonso and Izan Guevara; Izan especially gave us a lot. The best compliment so far was after David saw the movie yesterday and he said the dialogue is the way they speak and interact in the paddock. He said it was like watching their lives there.”

“Mat had done documentaries full of life and he understood reality,” he says of the director. “I thought he would give a nice approach.

“Jordi has been immersed in this world for over 10 years,” Whitecross says. “It’s all very heightened – it’s a drama – but a lot of love and attention has gone into it. I thought it was a great opportunity to do something that hadn’t been done before.”

Grand prix racing has barely transitioned to the big screen but advances in CGI and cinematography now make the blur between fiction and real footage less absurd. To date, the series has been best served by Mark Neale’s documentary efforts since the turn of the century and the last big treatment might be the David Essex/Beau Bridges/Clarke Peters celluloid feature Silver Dream Racer made in 1979, which used the British Grand Prix for many scenes.

Idols had Dorna’s blessing, vital internal input from the paddock and then creativity with green screens and motorcycle ‘rigs’ to get the action shots they needed. “We tried to avoid having too many digital effects,” Gasull states. “I think you can see quite a lot of that in the F1 film and we tried to do as much on-track action as authentically as we could to really reflect the MotoGP world. Of course, we have to have some licence. It’s a movie for the core fans – and I hope they will love it – but we also have to please a general audience because it is an emotional movie.”

“Dorna were fantastic,” Whitecross adds. “Even to the point of adapting some of the bikes for our cameras, attaching our material to the drones and helicopters and they gave us access to their world-leading [broadcast] team. We had our own amazing international group of camera operators but there is no way you can hope for the level of experience in just a few months that the MotoGP crew have built for many years. It was very much a collaboration.

“We tried basic things, like strapping iPhones to the bikes, GoPros and adapting our cameras,” Whitecross goes on. “It was a mixture of lo-fi and hi-fi. You could probably mount an IMAX camera on an F2 car to look like F1…but you cannot do that for bikes.”

While Pitt and co. could film with rigs as part of APXGP, there was not much chance of Casas and his fellow cast getting their knees down. “I don’t know how it works on a Brad Pitt film but there are inevitably issues of insurance,” says Whitecross.

The actors were able to ride at Aspar’s private Valencian circuit to grasp the correct mannerisms. Whitecross explained that 27-year-old Casas, a motorcyclist, was “desperate to do more than he was allowed” and eventually permitted the actor to exit pitlane for real in the final week of filming. Inevitably, it led to a crash. “It was a spectacular tumble,” the director grimaces. “Luckily, he was fine but had sheared quite a bit of skin on his legs.”

Otherwise, Idols exploited the limits of their European ‘indie’ budget. “We did a little bit of green screen for close-ups and so on,” Whitecross says. “For an audience, there is that ‘distancing thing’ of a crash helmet involved with the actor and you want them to have that connection and feel those moments of danger.

“We also had this great guy called Victor, who owns a simulator. For Oscar and the camera team we’d program what we’d seen at the track in MotoGP the week before and then he would simulate them for the close-ups. I think it feels very real and the camera can get in and grab some achievable shots. Although if we were lucky enough to do it [a sequel] again we’d know how we could add yet another layer of sophistication.”

Stunt riders and ex-GP riders recreated some of the dicier elements and MotoGP teams loaned factory bikes for different set-ups and for a set of runs after the final 2024 Grand Prix in Barcelona.

For Whitecross and his team, there was also the trickiness of squeezing around the pressures and time sensitivity of a grand prix. Sometimes it required some guerrilla-style filmmaking. “In documentaries, you only get one take and it was the same [in MotoGP],” he reveals. “Dorna would allow us onto the grid to film with our riders before a GP and we’d have two minutes! Usually on a film set you are used to complete control but here we had to mix our actors, riders and bikes with the real teams. We’d get one take.

“Then, in the script, we didn’t really have scenes as such but more like ‘connective tissue’ like the guys walking through the paddock or going for a run. We knew we had to be nimble with those. The people around the paddock were very accommodating and I think the real riders were very intrigued.”

The official title of the film is Idolos and the production team are well aware of the international restrictions of a Spanish movie (even if subtitles are now more widely accepted in the wake of award-winning titles like Parasite and Roma and series like Squid Game and Money Heist). The decision was made to harness the possibilities of funding for the project and also reflected some of the geo-reality around the series at this time with only 2 native English-speaking riders from the 22 on the grid. Trackhouse Racing is the sole American team in the premier class but they employ a Spaniard and a Japanese for its Aprilia RS-GPs.

“In the beginning there was the chance that the guy [protagonist] came from Manchester. Then it was a small UK town and then he was an American who comes to Spain…but every time I tried to write it like that it never really fitted,” admits Gasull. “The reality, the truth, for MotoGP now is that Italians and Spaniards are on top of the world. We even considered having Spaniards talking in English and it became a budget thing in the end.

The film is entirely in Spanish

“Having it in Spanish gives a lot of truth to the story,” he says, in his impeccable English. “If it would have been with an English or American cast then there would also be more international reach but it would be a different movie. In a sense I know I am missing a lot of commerciality and potential box office because, at the end of the day, it’s what F1 did: an American coming into a European world and exploding. But it is a lot more Anglo Saxon there. It’s a hard balance.”

Idols premieres in cinemas in Spain on January 23rd. UK distribution is currently being discussed. On the second day of filming scenes, at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya media centre, in the wake of the last GP of 2024, a senior Warner Bros producer told Motor Sport that that the company expects Idols to be one of the biggest earners in the Iberian Peninsula after James Cameron’s latest instalment of Avatar. According to Whitecross and Gasull, the company are “very happy” with Idols and a sequel is already touted but the real test now comes through bums on seats and tickets sold.