FOR THE RECORD
DOCUMENTING ONE FINAL SEASON FOR DAVID MILLAR
What I love about professional road cycling as a viewer is its mesmeric, meditative quality. It’s a big part of why I wanted to make a documentary about that world. My first cycling film, 2007’s Standing Start, was a documentary short that focussed on Scottish track rider Craig MacLean and making it led me to first meeting David Millar. I’d followed his career from the start, perhaps because we are a similar age and we share Scottish nationality.
We shot much of Standing Start at the Revolution events at the Manchester velodrome. David was racing, and it reminded me of how graceful and elegant a rider he was, especially when compared to someone like Craig, who is a real brute on a bike. David’s sister, Fran, was working on the Revolution events and she set up a meeting between us at the Braveheart charity dinner later in 2007. We ended up talking deep into the night about the possibilities for making a film together. It’s not taken up until this point to make it but it was crucial to choose the right moment to follow him. It has taken time to figure out the details and decide at what point in his career we’d make it and I’ve also made some other films in between.
He’d mooted the idea that he was going to retire this year, with the Commonwealth Games being in Glasgow, so shooting during his final year seemed appropriate. We did some test shoots last year, too, at Tirreno-Adriatico and the Giro d’Italia, which for us as filmmakers was a massive eye-opener into how difficult a job we
WE WANT TO CAPTURE THE TRUE EXPERIENCE OF BIKE RACING FROM
THE INSIDE AND DAVID MILLAR IS OUR WAY INTO THAT WORLD
had on our hands, both in terms of technique and also nailing down a man with a very changeable schedule. You have to cut down as many elements of possibility as far as you can. Embracing these moments is key to the success of any film, especially a documentary. WITH FICTION FILMMAKING you are in control over most elements and although problems come up each day that are out of your power, they’re easier to manage. But that is what’s exciting about filmmaking like this – you’re dealing with very real moments with real people, and you have to embrace it.
We’re planning on shooting at the early Italian races such as Tirreno-Adriatico and then go from there. The Italian races have so much passion and vibrancy and RCS Sport are excited about our film and want to be a part of it. We want to shoot as intimately as possible within the stages, which takes a lot of support from race organisers.
Financing the film is a big challenge. We’ve secured our first chunk of funding and we’ve enough to get us through Tirreno-Adriatico. We’re partly financing it through private investment, which is fairly unusual in documentary, so cycling fans interested can help back it. We’re also launching a Kickstarter campaign in the very near future. In a perfect world we’d have the finance to go out and make the film without anyone knowing and keep it under wraps until the finished product was ready to be seen. But to make the film we want to make, we need to be seen to be making it.
A lot of documentaries or films have focussed on the big champions and capturing the race-winning moves but this isn’t going to be about the ‘ will he, won’t he win the race?’ We want to capture the true experience of bike racing from the inside and David is our way into that world. We want to show what goes on within the team on the road when the TV cameras aren’t there by getting the sounds and images that are never captured. There’s so much more to be done than what is out there already.
In terms of influences, there is a non-cycling documentary called Leviathan which is brilliant. It’s about the commercial fishing industry and takes place entirely on one American vessel. They used these tiny cameras, there’s no dialogue but the sounds and the weirdness of this swaying, creaking boat captured by the cameras… You’re there, on that boat and completely immersed in that world for 90 minutes. In a way, it’s what we’re attempting with our film. I want people to come out of that cinema and say, “I feel like I’ve just ridden that race.” Finlay Pretsell, 34, is the director of the as-yetuntitled David Millar documentary project