Perfect Road, a documentary by Danish directors and cousins Adam and Christian Bonke, follows him on extreme journey through Europe’s highest mountain passes, while also providing a character study.

After its Zurich Festival world premiere, Perfect Road screened at the 2026 BFI London Film Fest.

“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, or 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.’ Basically, we’re two distinct entities. They were trying to film something, and I tried to achieve something.”

What helped the Bonkes was the man they followed

“Max is very organized, and he is a nerd when it comes to planning and mapping,” Adam Bonke says. “We knew 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.’ There were some delays, when the weather hit, but he actually stuck to the plan amazingly.”

Christian Bonke discusses how Schnell stuck to his independence and took on the mountain challenge without help. “Many nights, we wanted to invite him inside the campervan and offer him food. But he refrained from that. He was in the van just once–for a very short period.”

Adds Adam: “We just wanted to show him what we were doing, and filming, so he came in for two minutes and then left again.”

Schnell is valuing his freedom and nature so much that the filmmakers 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 soon he became a little tired of the camera being there. One of his core values is solitude, but then he had three of us going around with him.”

Adds Adam: “The worst thing for him was 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.”

But the filmmaker duo had to be ready to capture any unusual encounters or special moments. “We quickly learned that 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 had conversations with other human beings. We wanted to give him space, but we also really needed to be there when something social happened.”

Things have changed since the film shoot three years ago. Asked if he was planning any new big challenges, Schnell says: “There has not been one single idea in those three years since the challenge that really sounded sexy enough to go for. 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, it’s a different challenge. It’s not a dramatic, sporty challenge, but for me, it’s challenging.”

“We often talk about how we miss those days,” Christian Bonke says. “It was so beautiful, and you felt embraced by nature. After meeting Max, we were struck by how conventional our lives at home were and how many constraints they had. We could get a little glimpse of living differently.”

Adam Bonke shares: “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 is. We can all relate to what he’s done. We all fantasize occasionally 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 did something radical with his life.”