From his first film about riding across the Australian Outback with his brother Lachlan Morton to recent projects, such as his work for the New York Times about a midnight baseball game in Fairbanks, Alaska on the summer solstice, Gus brings a unique perspective to movies about sport.

Athletes aren’t superhuman to Gus. He was a racer himself.

Athletes are human beings, with everyday flaws and joys and doubts, who are able to do extraordinary things. That makes their stories all the more interesting. That is what makes what they do heroic.

We spoke to Gus about his vision for EF Explore presented by Wahoo: five films from five different directors that follow the cycle of athletes’ dreams.

Lander Androgeni directed Alex Baudin - Chasing a Tour de France Dream. Anuska Ariztimuño was the director for Building The Team Of The Future: EF Education-Oatly. And Sam Davis directed Living the Dream: Darren Rafferty.

Next up is a film about Cédrine Kerbaol by director Samantha André, while Gus directed one focused on EF Education-Onto junior Peyton Burckel, which will be released later in the year.

Read on for more from Gus and subscribe to the EF Pro Cycling YouTube channel to watch Explore presented by Wahoo.

Explore is an ongoing collaboration between me and EF Pro Cycling and, like any good concept or any good story, it develops as it goes on. When we first started this in 2023, our idea for Explore was more physical, the idea that the bike is a way to unlock landscapes and places and see the world. It has now evolved to be more conceptual. Our idea of exploring what it means to ride goes even deeper. It is about what it means to commit yourself to something. The series is about exploring the characters of these athletes and what the sport means to them, what it's like to be them, and what it means to them to be doing what they're doing against the challenges they face.

The platform is obviously a professional cycling team. It’s all centered around racing bikes, but it is about more than just pro cycling. It is a series of portraits. In the past, our films have been focused on interpreting the experience of an event. This year, we're turning that around and focusing on characters and their experience. I know that sounds broad and basic when I say it like that, but coupled with the voices of each of these filmmakers, it allows us to really explore who the riders are and what makes them tick. Explore is about exploring their journeys as professional athletes, following their dreams.

Whenever I take on any project, the hardest thing, I feel, is to shed new light on the subject. I don’t think it's enough for me to just tell the same story about a new person. Each time, I try to bring some sort of new point of view to it, visually and structurally, within the restrictions that we have. We are dealing with athletes and they take their jobs very seriously. They have a responsibility there. When we’re coming in, wanting to capture them at an inflection point in their career, often that's a time when they'll want to say, “Leave me alone. I have a job to do.” We’re coming into their world and we need to be sensitive and navigate all of that and be mindful of how the things we want to do will affect them, but still be able to produce something that is visually and content-wise unique.

We often try to get people to take a point of view that they haven't taken before. It is often a really hard thing to access the experience, the emotion, the feeling, because often the questions that we're asking aren't questions that they've been asked before, so they haven't given them a lot of thought. Maybe there are things they've felt or experiences they've had, but they haven't been able to articulate them in their heads. Athletes are often asked questions, but they aren't always given the freedom to think and explore. I think a lot of athletes, and a lot of people just in general, have a preconceived notion of what someone wants when that person asks them a question. With a lot of these athletes and the way that we come at these stories, they feel they need to give you an answer and they try to give you the answer that you want. Getting past that is probably one of the biggest challenges.

In my experience, people want to talk to athletes about being an athlete and the human being behind the athlete is secondary to that or an afterthought to that. Athletes have roles to perform and when they are answering interviews, they're a lot different to when you're just hanging out with them.

I want to reverse that and put the human being first, athlete second, and create distance between who they are and their day job. I want to know who else they are. Maybe even I don’t understand, but that is the approach that I take. I'm genuinely curious about these people's experiences as people and want to talk to them in that way and treat them with respect, independent of what they do or their results as athletes.

I think they are fascinating, because if you talk about what makes a hero, it is their flawed nature. It is seeing them do something that on immediate perception might be perfect or otherworldly and then going beyond that to find the flaw. That's what we're doing. That's what good storytelling is. That's what makes good characters. All of us are flawed. We are starting at this exceptional, unrelatable, otherworldly, superhuman, whatever you want to call it, supernatural performance, and then we're going back to the point where you and I can relate to them, and that could be in the strangest moment, in the strangest place, and it could be anything. They love to go dancing or have an inability to stick to a schedule or get homesick, all of these things that we, as normal people, feel. When you just see a superhuman performance, you might think those things just don’t happen for those sorts of people, but I think where these stories become really powerful is when you start to see yourself in them. That is when you can be uplifted.

My ultimate purpose or motivation for telling stories about sport is that they move society forward. When those points cross and you start to see yourself in them, you are able to believe that you might be capable of more than you thought you were. You start to be a better person. That’s where the power of sport lies, and that's what we're trying to get in these stories, that connection point, that crossover point, where we can show that these superhuman athletes are just human.

I think over the last 15 years, not with the rise of sports science, but with the rise of increasing computing power, our ability to really analyze and focus on data and understand what goes into a performance has increased.

At the same time, what I think people love about sport – it’s why we love an underdog story, isn't it? – is that it sometimes goes against everything that logic would tell us. When that happens, there is a kind of magic. And we are looking for the magic.

Cycling is a very demanding, fascinating sport. And these characters are not robots. They're humans and they're idiosyncratic and they have good times and they have bad times. None of them just follow an Excel spreadsheet. This idea that everything can be reduced down to numbers is just wrong. The numbers are great and there is so much magic still there. And there will always be magic there.

What we're trying to do is remind people that cycling is not full of robots. It’s very much not that. These riders are pros and their stories fly in the face of that.

If you think about what goes into winning a stage at the Tour de France, for example. There are so many evolving factors that it is impossible to compute what would guarantee a win. So, if we allow a little bit of the magic into the way that we talk about it, and the way that we think about it, audiences will engage with it more. And the racing speaks for itself.

If you look at racing in the last few years, if you had assumed there would be a process of homogenization, where all performances would rather quickly narrow down and become robotic, it has regressed. All of a sudden, it's not that. There are elements of control, but the way these athletes are emerging and bike racing has radically shifted. There is still magic there. There is still something that's unquantifiable. Bring on the science. Let's try and figure this all out. I don’t think we’re going to be able to. And that’s cool. We can have both.

Obviously, there is a place for journalism, right? And, there is a place for video diaries and behind-the-scenes stories about athletes that update you about what's going on. Those are all interesting and provide a raw look at the sport and the machinations and workings of it. I'm not disputing that, or criticizing that, but what I'm interested in are the extremely subjective versions of that. I want to know how Lander or Sam or Anuska, these filmmakers who are both inside, and outside, or adjacent to the sport, see it. What's their feeling towards racing? What will we see through their eyes? That way, I think we can unlock a deeper understanding, because they provide us with a new point of view. By incorporating really distinctive voices in each of these films, we hope we can uncover a different truth or see the truth of the sport in a different way. I think that's important and interesting.

As filmmakers and directors, our whole thing is magic. Whether you are telling nonfiction or a fictional story, it's all about finding that. So, when you say to someone, go find your magic, they are going to be really good at it.

In the same way that the team finds bike riders who are good at going uphill or good at riding on the front, we have found people who are good at finding the magic.

Cycling as a sport has sort of got it into its own head that it is boring and dorky, so there is this weird obsession or weird desire to do anything but cycling stuff. There are all these cycling brands who are like, let’s get a skateboarder or let’s get a BMXer, or let's get all of these people who have nothing to do with racing and aren't core at all and let's bring them in and let's make it about them. And you're like, what the heck? What are you doing? Are you embarrassed? Who cares what anyone else thinks? It's our sport. Let's do it our way.

We want to show these athletes who are dedicated to this thing, who are core as heck. Their stories contextualize the performance, the racing, because that's the lens we're looking at all of this through. They are portraits.

And, with the amount of effort that we are putting into these stories – you could make ten times the amount of content that’s lowest common denominator and would probably do better on Instagram and all of that – but I think it is an opportunity to keep a log and really show what this sport is. It is really special and important and we are very fortunate to be in this position. We have carved a little niche for all of these filmmakers to be able to go and make something that people will watch for years to come. Hopefully, these films will still be relevant years down the track because they speak to these core themes of humanity and of the sport.