Years ago, Maximilian Schnell left his job and his life in Paris and began a nomadic lifestyle on his bicycle. The road has given him freedom and adventure. And he has set himself grueling physical and mental challenges.
Perfect Road, a documentary from Danish directors and cousins Adam and Christian Bonke, follows him on an extreme journey through some of Europe’s highest mountain passes, while also providing a meditation on modern life and character study. For one, even in an age of digital nomads, Schnell’s lifestyle pushes the envelope. And then, his relationship with his partner Nina makes him question his life priorities.
So, get ready for mountain vistas and exhausting cycling days to take your breath away and questions about your life choices to swirl around in your head!
Elk Film and Dogwoof produced Perfect Road, with Andreas Dalsgaard, Anna Godas, Oli Harbottle, Miriam Nørgaard serving as producers. Jonatan Mose served as cinematographer, with editing handled by Martin Anthon.
After its Zurich Film Festival world premiere, Perfect Road has been screening at the 70th edition of the BFI London Film Festival. THR talked about the film with the Bonkes in London and checked in with Schnell via Zoom in Bolzano.
“I had planned the challenge for seven or eight months, maybe a year,” Schnell tells THR. “From what I’ve understood about the film industry, it’s a very long-term process because writing the script, financing the movie, and things like that take a long time, and usually you do that before [shooting] the film.” So when he agreed to the project, he made very clear that the film team had to make things work on his schedule. “I would not postpone the challenge by two years,” he emphasizes. “And I was super clear about that from the first day.”
The film team had to come up with a strategy to capture as much as possible without interfering with Schnell’s challenge. “I always said the same thing,” the cyclist recalls. “‘I’m in my challenge, and I live my life. If you want to do a documentary, it really has to be a documentary. There’s no way I will act anything. There’s no way I will repeat any scene.’ I said, ‘You deal with whatever you can get, but I don’t adapt to you. I don’t want the filmmaking to take a single piece of energy out of me.’ So basically, we’re two distinct entities. They were trying to film something, and I tried to achieve something, and that’s it.”
The filmmakers mulled various plans for how to best capture footage. In the process, they embarked on an adventure that involved living three months in a campervan and not only filming technology and nature but also all sorts of other winding roads. “We thought initially that we would have several DPs over the course of three months,” Christian Bonke tells THR. “But then our DP was kicked out by his girlfriend, and he had nowhere to stay. So he said, ‘I’m going to do all three months. This is perfect for me.’ And Adam and I took turns.”
You don’t have to worry about the cinematographer, though. “He said, ‘I’ll come back a different man,'” Adam Bonke shares. “And he did. He came back, and he got back with his girlfriend, and now they have twins.”
What helped the Bonkes with the planning of the expedition was the man they followed. “Max is very organized. And he is a nerd when it comes to planning and mapping,” Adam Bonke tells THR. “So we did knew pretty much every day where he would be, which peaks he would climb, and we could look 12 days ahead and say, ‘Okay, he’s going to be in Austria on this peak then, and in 16 days he’s going to be there.’ There were some delays, of course, when the weather hit, but he actually stuck to the plan amazingly.”
Schnell was adamant that the film crew couldn’t provide any help to him. “At some points, we were thinking that maybe the crew could take a set of tires, so that if my tires wear out, I would have them in their car,” he shares. “But I didn’t want them to take energy from me, and I also didn’t want any advantage.”
Christian Bonke highlights how Schnell stuck to his independence and indeed took on the mountain challenge without help throughout the journey. “Many nights, we wanted to invite him inside the campervan and offer him some food,” he says. “But he really refrained from that. He was in the van once for a very short period.”
Adds Adam: “Yeah, we just wanted to show him what we were doing, what we were filming. And he came in for two minutes and then left again.”
With Schnell valuing his freedom and nature so much, the filmmaker duo also noticed that at times, he needed more space. “Initially, he was thrilled that we would make the film, but he was so concentrated on the difficult physical task,” says Christian. “So very soon he also became a little tired of the camera being there. One of his core values is solitude, but he had three of us going around with him all the time.”
Adds Adam: “I think the worst thing for him probably was this fact that there was a car behind him, because he really loves nature, silence, solitude and just being in that moment. And then there we were in a diesel van behind him a lot of the time.”
Concludes Christian: “So, we were focusing on not being too intrusive. I think we let him be in the zone, and I think you can almost feel that sometimes he got so used to us being around that he didn’t even notice us.”
That said, the filmmaker duo had to be ready to capture any unusual encounters or special moments. “We quickly learned, and we had predicted this, that, of course, filming a guy going up and down mountains every day is going to get repetitive,” recalls Adam. “It’s going to get boring. So we really needed to be there when he did something else, when he met someone, when he was with friends, when he had conversations with other human beings. We wanted to give him space when we could, but we also really needed to be there when something social happened.”
Does the film team feel the camera did have an impact on Schnell? “It’s interesting what a camera does to you in a way. I think you start to reflect somehow,” offers Christian Bonke. “There’s almost a metaphysical element to him sensing our gaze. Early on, he said to us that maybe he was contemplating whether he could continue his whole life like this. So that was something lingering in the back of his mind. He ended up living like that for almost 10 years, sleeping in a tent every night.”
Indeed, things have changed a bit since the film shoot three years ago. Asked if he was planning any new big mountain challenges, Schnell tells THR: “There has not been one single idea in those three years since the challenge that really sounded sexy enough to just go for. I mean, I’m in a challenge because I now have a base camp here in Bolzano. It’s quite a challenge to settle somewhere. I create backpacking events, so it’s a different challenge. It’s not a dramatic, sporty challenge, but for me, it’s challenging.”
Could people see Schnell in another movie or series? “You never say never, but not a documentary – that’s for sure,” he shares.
The cyclist leaves it up to viewers of Perfect Road what they want to or actually do take away from the film experience.
The filmmaker duo has taken something with them from those months in the campervan. “We often talk about how we miss those days,” Christian Bonke tells THR. “It was so beautiful, and you felt embraced by nature. After meeting Max, we were completely struck by how conventional our lives at home were and how many constraints they had. So we could get a little glimpse of living differently.”
And Adam Bonke shares with THR: “He says he’s trading comfort for freedom. That’s such a nice thing to say. And it really frames things perfectly. We were interested in learning what that price of freedom potentially is. I think we can all somehow relate to what he’s done. We all fantasize from time to time about leaving, about changing things, doing something radical with our lives. But very few of us do anything. Whether you’re interested in cycling or not, this is a guy who actually did something radical with his life.”
You have to watch Perfect Road to see how you feel about pushing the boundaries of freedom to their limit.