The Tour de France is unlike any sporting event in the world because of the way that the entire country rallies around the month-long race: families take weeks of vacation to travel in RVs along the stages, entire towns are shut down when the race paces through, and cyclists from all over bring their bikes to try and tackle the same climbs that the professional riders do.

Once I saw how the country rallied behind the event, my vision for shooting the project changed. I no longer wanted to shoot the race literally. Instead, I wanted to shoot all the peripherals that truly make it special: the land, the people, and the culture.