MIKE : You’d have to ask the selection jury… I don’t know what they were thinking….

It’s been a crazy journey. We had a short that people seemed to like. Once it got selected for Sundance we started exploring ideas to expand it into a full feature. But we had to move fast. We turned in our first script five days before Cannes last year and then we were shooting in August.

It was an absolute dream scenario to premiere this movie at Cannes, both because we shot here – 35 mins from the Croisette – but also because the undertones of the film are very much based on an American persecptive on French sensibilities and French culture and on cycling.

So to have been selected is unbelieveable, especially as when you’re making the movie you have no outside validation – only your own conviction in what you’re doing.

KYLE : In some ways the journey started here. Mike first presented the script in its final form, at Cannes last year. And then we shot one of the first scenes here so in a weird way it’s manifest destiny – we started here and now we’re premiering here.

MIKE : I think it’s a love story about friendship between two guys told over the course of 12-plus years, that deals with the challenging ups and downs of that relationship.

MIKE: Life is a climb. I think that title is the best representation of what the core of the story is about - how life is this constant struggle uphill for these characters who have to accept that it’s not going to be easy and there will be these challenges that make things more and more difficult.

It’s a bit like the way the good cyclists are those who can take a lot of pain over a long amount of time. Our ability to enjoy life and experience it is directly related correlated to our ability to endure suffering.

A bit like Kyle on the Col de Vence today when he was cramping, but he kept turning the pedals….

KYLE : there’s a lot of reasons. One because it’s a great physical challenge which lays bare your emotional state, when your concentration and your energy is consumed by the physicality of doing the thing. There’s a purity of thought and the conversation in bike riding and in film making you are always trying to capture exactly that. The first and last scenes take place on the bike – it’s a strong theme in the movie.

MIKE : there’s a cycling history in France unlike any other. The drama and stories and history are endless.

But it’s actually more to do with having a French ex-girlfriend, and then a period in my life when I was starting to fall into French culture and it subjectively got tied into my experience of love at a time when I was ready to make a film.

French cinema is an influence too – these big ideas of love come from French stories, cinema and poetry. And we needed to create an exotic mystery about the character that Kyle and Mike are in love with. A French woman is very ‘on the nose’, and in line with two delusional American characters who have idyllic notions of what love is.

We went with it partly due to logistics but also because the view is insane; you can see the ocean and it really places you in the setting. And there are also weird little things like a little pony farm just after the Col that I could never possibly have imagined as part of the end of the first scene unless it was there and I’d seen it.

MIKE : There’s an immediacy that exists when you don’t cut. You get that in documentary style. And when you also utilize cinematic techniques and movements and blocking, and mise-en-scene to create a cinematic atmosphere in front of the camera then you kind of get the best of both worlds – intimacy of documentary plus the expanse of really dynamic camera movements. You’re utilizing the most ‘showy’ aspects of cinema in a way.

The way we wrote the scenes were very conducive to that style of shooting….Even if that resulted in putting Kyle under an ice lake when it’s -20 outside for 45 seconds….

KYLE : Or struggle up a hill on bikes for 7 minutes while saying words.

There’s also a pressure and focus on the acting which comes with it. Everyone gets into the moment really intensely because you have to really live in it every second.

MIKE : for me it’s the biggest stage in global cinema, which makes it surreal to be playing there.

It has a history of celebrating film that not a lot of other festivals do, and it has this amazing mandate – to bring in the best of world cinema from every corner of the globe and from every genre. It’s a curation platform, really like no other.

KYLE : Hell yeah. I wasn’t a cyclist before. When we did the short I hadn’t ridden a bicycle since I was 12. It’s been an epiphany in terms of discovering the beauty of it. We had to get into it so intensely. We went up and down Col de Vence maybe 24 times in total last summer. The day before that we rode it in full (with you guys). We know Col de Vence pretty well. It’s an old friend.

We cycle when we write in California. We take a break at lunchtime and ride to Griffith Park, the Hollywood sign and back. It’s a great way for us to change our pace and get that therapy that it provides and that clarity of headspace. It’s a part of my life now.

MIKE : I got into cycling because I wanted to buy the clothes and I thought it would be weird if I was wearing the clothes without a bike. I wanted to be wearing lycra at all times and to protect myself from being considered a real creep, I thought I should buy a bike.