Pittsford native chases riders of Tour de France

Jason Berry is a mountain biker, a competitive cyclist, which means he’s well-acquainted with endurance and pushing himself to the limit.

Which served the Pittsford native well when he set out on what’s been the defining project of his filmmaking career so far: A documentary following a team of cyclists during one of the biggest — and most demanding — events on the sports calendar, the Tour de France.

Berry and a small crew followed Team HTC-Columbia in the 2009 event, through the grueling, three-week race in France and neighboring countries, an often precarious trek through the alpine regions.

The obstacles
For Berry, that sometimes meant working 17-, 18-, 19-hour days — meeting with the cyclists’ support staffs (“the whole circus,” Berry calls them) before breakfast, planning out the day’s game-plan; following and filming the bikers during each day’s run (he figures he himself shot some 90 percent of the footage); conducting post-race interviews; downloading the digital footage off flash cards onto hard drives so the cards would be clear for the next day’s footage.

Sometimes it would be past 2 a.m. when Berry got to bed, knowing he’d be up around 6:30 or 7 to start the whole process again.

“It was by far the most stressful thing I have ever endured — and I’m an endurance athlete,” he said.

Like the riders, he and his team stuck it out, resulting in the Gripped Films feature-length documentary “Chasing Legends.” The movie will get a local screening Thursday, Aug. 26, at the Pittsford Plaza Cinema.

First came the issue of funding. Director Berry and his business partner, producer Ken Bell, got no corporate funding: it’s an indie film in the truest sense. Berry cashed in his retirement savings, and Bell took out a second mortgage on his house — so they were committed.

In addition to the expenses involved with travel and filming, they had to get media accreditation, which doesn’t come cheap. The Amaury Sports Organization, which owns the race, zealously guards its copyright, and getting permission cost Berry and company slightly over $38,000.

Team HTC-Columbia — a U.S.-based but (like most teams) pan-national team of cyclists that included British cycling standout Mike Cavendish — agreed to let Berry and his team accompany and film them, as long as it didn’t cost the team anything.


The journey
And so, July of 2009 saw Berry and a skeletal team — a driver/interpreter, assistant, Bell and Berry — and their rented RV set off on their European journey, a high-paced, high-stress, high-stakes attempt to capture the sights, the sounds, the very feel of the contest.

They had cameras in team cars, cameras on bikes and helmets, cameras on motorcycles and helicopters, sometimes on professional photographers in the crowd.

“There’s not one day that I wasn’t impressed with these athletes,” Berry said. “It’s absolutely a spectacle of giant proportions. To see the steepness of the mountains, and these guys propelling themselves uphill and down — there are very few guardrails in Europe, and we’re talking about some of the tallest mountains in the world. These guys are on bicycles in the cold, in the wet, and they’re taking those corners ...” and doing it fast.

Of course, Berry knew these were consummate athletes. What was the biggest surprise on the tour?

“I would say some of the surprises were the relationships we built,” he said. “Not so much for the riders — they’re very focused, they hold their cards closed to their chest; they’re in the chess game of their lives, as their performance determines their salary, and whether they can come back. But relationships found with mechanics, sougniers (handlers), the rest of the staff — once they saw us as more than annoying media and began to see us as friends.”

The Gripped Films team’s day didn’t end when the riders crossed the line for that day’s “stage” — which frequently hovered about 180 to 210 kilometers. They would interview cyclists after the race, including American superstar Lance Armstrong, who took third overall in his comeback tour. (HTC’s Cavendish won a number of stages, but neither Cavendish nor HTC were among the top finishers.)


The finish line
The July journey has hardly been the end of the road for Berry’s labors. Setting a firm deadline to premiere the film at the 2010 Tour of California on May 15 — a goal he hit — Berry spent his time after the race editing, editing, editing.

“That’s been a year of turning the project around on a skeleton staff,” he said. “When I started to realize what it would require, that was terrifying. I realized I was going to have to be working 100 to 120 hours a week for months. From December to May, it would take every waking hour, every bit of ability that I have, to do it.”

And his labors haven’t stopped now that the film is out: Now his efforts are poured into getting distribution deals, both domestically and abroad. It’s been slower going that he’d like, he admits.

“It either requires really good connections, which I don’t have; or a lot of money, which I also don’t have — or absolute, almost blind ambition and determination.”

Which he does have. The proof is in the screening.

“In the end,” he said, “I was very, very happy with how it turned out.”