Sensorimotor circuits have traditionally been studied using defined stimuli that map onto reproducible behavioural responses. However, the many features of a complex natural environment would inevitably drive multiple dedicated circuits, eliciting a combination of competing motor commands. To cope, sensorimotor transformations should be selectively modulated depending on the animal's goals and internal state. Here, we have developed a novel behavioural paradigm to study how the fruit fly processes competing visual stimuli to generate coherent behaviour. We exploit the fruit fly's optomotor response and courtship tracking, two distinct visually-guided innate behaviours that can be reliably elicited in our experimental setup. Using this paradigm, we show that male flies suppress the optomotor response while engaged in courtship tracking. We then recapitulate this experiment in virtual reality, where the female fly is replaced by a dark dot while the global motion stimulus remains the same, allowing precise manipulation of stimulus parameters. In this setting, males switch between tracking and optomotor responses, and the probability and dynamics of this switching are governed by the relative strengths of the stimuli. We are currently investigating the underlying modulatory mechanisms that control the relative weight of these independent behaviours, focusing on the role of octopaminergic inputs. Overall, our results show that fruit flies dynamically modulate innate responses to task-irrelevant stimuli, suggesting the existence of visual attention-like mechanisms in the fly brain.