When Austin-based documentary filmmaker David Modigliani first met Beto O’Rourke, it was in El Paso. More specifically, it was at first base in a baseball game. Modigliani was playing for the Texas Playboys, the sandlot baseball team that he co-founded, and O’Rourke was the “lanky centerfielder” for the El Paso team who also happened to be a United States congressman.

Months later, in April 2017, the teams played each other again, this time in Austin. By then, O’Rourke had announced he was going to run against Ted Cruz for the U.S. Senate. After the game he jumped up on a hay bale to make a speech. Still in his dirty uniform, he spoke to the crowd about how he was going to go to every county in Texas and he wasn’t going to take money from political action committees or hire political consultants or pollsters.

“It was immediately apparent to me that he was a generational political talent,” Modigliani says. “But I was equally intrigued by the type of risk-taking, unconventional campaign he was going to run.”

O’Rourke tapped into the human side of politics that Modigliani found fascinating, especially after the 2016 presidential election, which left so many people feeling disillusioned by politics.

“I felt very acutely how much we dehumanize each other through politics and how disconnected that leaves us and how much that dehumanizing causes people to tune out and not be involved in the political process,” he says. O’Rourke was an intriguing subject to the filmmaker.

Around the same time, Modigliani’s friend Rebecca Feferman, a content strategist and marketing consultant who once worked in publicity for South by Southwest, was working with the political media company Crooked Media on co-founder Jon Lovett’s podcast Lovett or Leave It. She helped bring O’Rourke on the podcast.

“I was very impressed with him as a candidate and a human,” she says. “He really is what he seems to be, and he had that energy about him.”

By October 2017, Modigliani had decided he wanted his next documentary to be about following O’Rourke on the campaign trail. With help from Feferman, he approached O’Rourke’s team with the idea and much to their delight, O’Rourke gave his approval. So, Running with Beto was off and, well, running.

Without any formal agreement, and with complete creative and financial independence, Modigliani and his crew filmed the O’Rourke campaign for 12 months, from November 2017 to election night. They had access to the candidate’s family and campaign team, and often were able to go behind-the-scenes at critical moments, including right after O’Rourke’s loss to Cruz.

There were some challenges along the way, including the vast distances they’d have to travel around Texas. And as the campaign progressed and O’Rourke’s profile began to rise, the interest from national media grew. Because O’Rourke traveled in a van with a small team—just his deputy campaign manager and his communications director—Modigliani and his crew would need “to play musical chairs” to accommodate the media. But they were still given the access they needed to tell the candidate’s campaign story.

“I think it was a testament to their commitment toward transparency and wanting to show warts and all the human experience of going through the ringer of American politics,” Modigliani says.

To bring in some additional human elements, Modigliani also chronicled the story of three first-time activists during the campaign: a 17-year-old gun-safety activist from Houston; a former Republican from McAllen who was a lesbian Latina and voter registration activist; and a rural gun enthusiast who had a military background and was a fan of O’Rourke’s.

“We followed those three folks throughout the year to capture the political moment and the way that the Beto campaign was bringing people into the political process,” Modigliani says.

O’Rourke’s ability to attract huge crowds at his rallies in some of the Texas’ more conservative towns, including Paris, Pittsburgh, and Hunstville, was something that really stood out to Modigliani.

“People were amazed by how many neighbors had turned out. They didn’t believe that there were as many like-minded or independent-minded people in their community,” he says. “Beto, in his approach to his campaign, brought people out of their homes and out of their woodwork and connected them. And it was amazing to go to so many towns that had not had a statewide candidate from either party visit them in decades. That was amazing.”

In all, the film crew traveled 47,000 miles over the year, accumulating 700 hours of footage for the documentary.

By spending so much time with O’Rourke, Modigliani came away learning a lot about the man. He brought a “carefree joy and humor” to his travels around the state, Modigliani says, including prank calling his team and blasting the Ramones. He also was amazed at the candidate’s “uncanny ability to be in an urgent hurry and completely present at the same time.” O’Rourke would be racing to his next stop, eating tacos while driving. “Then once he arrives, making every person in that town feel like he had all afternoon to talk just with them.”

As the scenery and the political views of constituents changed during filming, one thing managed to stay consistent: Despite becoming a rising star in national politics, O’Rourke managed to stay the same person that Modigliani met on that baseball field a couple years earlier.

“It sort of felt like we were following a band that was becoming a national sensation, and that they decided to keep playing the songs that got him there,” he says. “It also was a case of when you start a campaign being so committed to being candid and transparent and authentic to who you are, it’s easier when things get crazy because you’re not having to preserve some façade that other politicians may create and be worried that it may be punctured. His radical transparency served him well as the campaign became more intense, because he never had to wonder who he was.”

Running with Beto premieres March 9 at the Paramount Theatre at 11:30 a.m. For additional screenings, go here.