The Experience is the Prize: Interview with Annika Iltis and Timothy Kane

Every year in Tennessee’s Frozen Head State Park, 40 runners set out on a race so difficult as to make finishing seem impossible. In 2012, filmmakers Annika Iltis and Timothy Kane shot the first documentary about The Barkley Marathons, bringing national attention to a race that had, until then, been a closely-guarded secret within the ultramarathon community. Their film "The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young" premiered at Austin Film Festival in 2014 where it won the Audience Award for Best Documentary. Over a decade later, the film remains one of the funniest and most fascinating looks at the world's toughest race and the people crazy enough to run it.

In advance of Hyperreal Film Club’s screening on January 13, 2025, our writer Ziah Grace sat down with the directors to talk about what made their film stand out from other sports docs, the responsibility of documentary filmmakers, and why anyone would choose to do an insurmountable task in the first place.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity

HFC: You originally heard about the Barkley from the article in The Believer, and that definitely raised the visibility of the race for a lot of people. But what attracted you both to specifically making a documentary about it? Did you have an interest in documentary filmmaking that you had had and the timing was right? Or was it something about this race and this story specifically?

Annika Iltis: I'll let Tim start that one off, because he was the one who found that essay in The Believer by Leslie Jamison.

Timothy Kane: Yeah, I think it was an issue of serendipitous timing. We came across that article by Leslie, and we were looking for a creative outlet on our own. We both work in the motion picture industry on the technical part of the business. This idea had sort of presented itself, and we didn't know what would come from it. But it was something that we both agreed was so interesting that we wanted to explore it.

AI: I think we were on a TV show at the time, and were working 70-hour weeks. I think this came to us when we were on a break from filming, and we just wanted to do something that was completely outside the realm of anything we've done before. And neither of us had made a documentary before. Tim did some investigating to find Laz [Gary "Lazarus Lake" Cantrell, co-creator of the Barkley Marathon], and it all fell into place, but it happened really quickly. And I will say that it probably wouldn't have happened if we had waited a year to try and do this. I think we probably would have been overwhelmed by it and what the race was, but because it happened all very quickly, we were out there in Tennessee within a few weeks. 
TK: But that was before we even really had a sense of what this was. We were starting to learn about it through some of the participants.

AI: To be honest with you, we went into this being like, "We don't know what this is going to be." We weren't intending to make a feature film. We were like, "This is interesting, let's shoot some stuff and see what happens." Because, most years, no one finishes the race at that point. Maybe we'll make some 10 minute-long thing about it. Whatever we shot was going to dictate what we made.

HFC: That sense of curiosity really comes through in the film, especially how you deliver each piece of information about what the race is. How did you land on the pacing of that?
AI: I'll say two things about that. One is that neither Tim or I are necessarily sports people. There are certain sports that I enjoy watching, but neither of us are runners. I love a great film, and we're film lovers, and so we just wanted to make something that anyone could enjoy, that really got to the soul of the Barkley. We wanted to make this for anyone who isn't able to ever do that race to have an experience remotely like it. To hopefully get inspired by it, and sort of understand what Laz is trying to do with it.

And we did watch some running documentaries. It's a whole genre that I had no idea existed, because I'm just not in that world. We did watch some of them, and we saw how they were put together, and they had a general formula that we were like, "Okay, we don't want to follow that formula because that's not really what we're making." For us, the main character of the film was the Barkley, was the race, and that was the structure of it. Laz sort of fills in for that as the voice of it.

But then the pacing of giving those little details out, we realized when we told people about the race, as you gave people information, bit by bit, they would slowly start to realize what it was about. So if you gave out all the information up front, it didn't hold the same weight, We were thinking of how to do that in the film itself, how do we pace out the details so that by the time the race is starting, you are like, "Oh my God, what are these people doing?"

TK: Telling the story ourselves verbally had a big impact on the structure, but we also had Leslie's essay as a touchstone that we would always go back to and read it. We wanted to have that same impact through the film.

HFC: Did you have any visual touchstones in terms of documentary filmmaking that you were inspired by? Or was it more dependent on what you could capture?

AI: I don't think we went in with specific visual points, but we realized there's only a couple of shots in the film that are interior shots. Every interview is outside because we wanted it to feel like you're there. And most everything takes place outside. And that also made it really difficult sound-wise. But we used what we had, we had some cameras, but none of it was super high end. The race itself is really gritty and we wanted the film to look like the race.

TK: And it's very difficult to get a sense of the scale of that place from the ground, no matter where you are around it. It's so challenging to get a sense of how difficult this is for the runners. But you have to have a starting place for films. When I read something, I just start to visualize it.  And the little bit of detail that we did have about this race from Leslie's essay, there were some visual cues like the colorful license plates blowing in the wind against a winter backdrop. There's just something very visual about that. So there were things that I was looking forward to seeing, how those would be captured, and what we could do with that. If it was just people running through the woods, it probably wouldn't be enough to get us out there. But it was also, like, "How can this really exist? How do we not know about this? How is this still happening? It's been going on for so long and is this actually real?"

HFC: Laz is such an amazing talking head and interview subject. I think every single time I've shown this movie to someone, any line he gives is a laugh line. It's really incredible.

AI: That main interview with him in the film, we actually got on that first scouting trip to Tennessee. We had just met him, and we had asked him when we were on the phone with him, "Hey, we're thinking of doing this." And he was like, "Well, it's a public park." And we're like, "We want you to be on board, we want you to be part of this and be okay with us doing it." But that main interview was the best possible way we could have got all of that. We had no idea that when the race actually happened, he's up almost that whole time. Hour by hour, he's just more and more tired. There's no way we could have gotten a great interview with that much information during the race.

TK: He was very generous, but when news stories and other documentaries capture him, it is really just soundbites. And he knows that, and he's good at it, but at the same time, I think we were able to sit down with him for an extended period of time. 

HFC: Was this your first time doing longform documentary interviewing?

TK: I had done a project where I was doing interviews, and that probably helped a little bit, but there was nothing like this where you're exploring a world you don't know anything about. So you have your own curiosity, along with trying to guide the subject a little bit and start to piece things together. Where can we go with this? What's interesting? And Annika was just paramount in getting a lot of the interview work. She did a lot of research, and she was excellent at gathering that stuff.

AI: I'm curious about people in general, and I like a good conversation. But for me, it was the first of this type of thing.

HFC: There are multiple points in the film where the finishers talk about what the race means and why they're out there 70 hours later still doing it. Did you come away with your own ideas on what the race meant that you didn't feature in the film?

AI: I think everyone goes away with their own understanding of why people do this. Nowadays with technology, it is really hard to push yourself in something that you know you're going to fail at. Most people don't want to fail. Failure isn't something that is necessarily rewarded in our culture, and I think it's so important. I wish I had learned earlier on to just do all the things and fail and fail and fail. It's fine, you're going to learn from it. I think that's the takeaway for me, because it's something that I have to remind myself of every day.

TK: I think it's easy too for people to look at this type of event and only see it as one thing. People just want to go and they want to win or they want to finish. I think Laz has a much broader view of things. I think that he realizes that every single person has their own reasons and their own goals and their own fears, so what he's able to do is present an arena for you to figure those things out, and for you to present yourself with this challenge. And one of the original intents was to present ourselves with this challenge. Sometimes it was very frustrating, in the sense that you know things are going wrong, and we're not experts at this. It's like, "Is this even worth doing?" Because it's really so hard. But when you finally get a sense of a direction, and you feel good, it propels you and motivates you. I think we were happy with how it came out and all the messages that came from it. This was sort of our own personal Barkley in a way.

AI: And it wouldn't have made sense if it was easy, right? 

HFC: Jasmine Paris was the first female finisher in 2024, and the female participants get mentioned briefly in the film, like Beverly Anderson-Abbs. Did you consider expanding on that storyline in the film?

AI: It was definitely a big part of it for me. We had a longer cut, and Bev’s story was a bigger part of the movie. When I had first read about Laz, there's a quote from him saying, "No female could ever finish the Barkley." And I had read that initially, and was like, "Who is this guy?" And I was a little worried that it was someone saying this who actually believed that. And then you meet him and you realize why he's saying that, and that it's motivating for people. The type of person who would run this race, that would be motivation for them.

But yeah, seeing a woman finish the race was just unbelievable and amazing. We tried to make it be a bigger part of the film. But we had what we shot, and we wanted to make a great movie. I wanted it to be 90 minutes long. The goal is to get to a really tight cut of the film where you have everything you want in there and nothing extraneous, and you hold people's attention, and they get something inspiring out of it.

So unfortunately, when we were cutting it, we got to a two-hour cut at one point, and then we took it back. You really kind of have to get in there and go, "Well, what is the story?" And unfortunately, that part of the story just wasn't part of the final cut for this, even though Bev is great and really inspiring. She did really well that year. But we were over the moon excited when Jasmine finished. So congrats to her.

HFC: It’s unbelievable how many people have finished. I always think about the fact that the year you filmed the race, more people had been to the moon than had finished it. And now the number of finishes has more than doubled.
TK: Even when we were there in 2012, it had been going on for 25 years. A lot of the people that were involved were a core group of friends and family. It was such a small thing that you had to be deep in that world to even know it existed. You wouldn't have found it in a news story or Sports Illustrated, or whatever.

But I think every year the field of athletes is getting stronger and stronger, and Laz is excited about that, because he wants to see what people can do. But it's made it a different event in that sense.

HFC: Do you feel some responsibility for widening the visibility of it, and how that might have changed the race?
AI: That was a huge worry for us, honestly. When we first got to the race, we wanted people to be part of the film in the way that they wanted to be part of the film, and we wanted to do right by the Barkley. The most important thing to us was that we were conveying the soul of the race without giving away any of its secrets. So there was definitely a trust-building moment in there when we met people. Some people were a little concerned about us being there and filming. And rightly so, because it had been going on for a long time and it was a secretive thing.

TK: And a special thing.

AI:  Yeah, and they didn't know us, and why should they trust us? And so we had to explain, "Look, we want this to be something that you are all happy with." And there was a concern of like, "What is this going to do to the race?" We had long conversations with Laz about this, because we were very concerned about it. But the reason he got on board with it in the first place was that the race had been shut down before by an old park ranger who was not on board with it. But Laz's idea was that if we film this and people see it, then it will protect the race. His thinking was that this is going to spread what he's doing to more people, and inspire more people to push themselves. And his thing was always, "Nothing ever stays the same." Whether we do this, or someone else does it, nothing is static. So he was always supportive.

HFC: How did the Kickstarter funding and this being such a private, personal project affect the production?

TK: There were one or two weird times where some people did approach us during the post-production process to potentially help fund the rest of the movie. And we were sort of intrigued by that, just because we didn't have any money. But we realized right away that we didn't know what their intentions were. So, in the end, not really having anybody else to answer to was definitely helpful in the sense that we were able to make what we wanted to make. And we were very grateful to the Kickstarter audience for their support. But at the same time, I don't think we ever thought that we were making it for them, necessarily. We wanted to make ourselves happy, and in order to do that, we wanted to make sure that the Barkley community was happy.

AI: I think that we made the best movie we could for the Barkley. I'm sure that our film was part of the reason that now more people know about it, but hopefully in a positive way. I think whether we had made this film or someone else had eventually made a film, people would have found about out about the Barkley because ultramarathons were getting bigger. It would have gotten out there at some point.
TK: We're always trying to be self-aware and not ignorant to the fact that, as a filmmaker, as soon as you walk in the room, everything sort of changes. You try to be as delicate as possible, but you have an impact. The runners knew we were there, Laz knew we were there. And so just by being there, we know that we had an impact. And then the fact that we made the film has an impact on the world, has an impact on Frozen Head, it has an impact on Tennessee, it has an impact on Laz. But we did try to take everything into mind respectfully as much as possible.

HFC: Where did the title come from?
AI: I know it sounds so scary and maybe cannibalistic, but I think that's the joke. It was one of the nicknames for the race. We did not come up with that.

TL: It's sort of a phrase that exists out in the world, right? I think it's been used in various ways, but they certainly adopted it and it seemed appropriate for them. We explored some other options, but none seem to really wrap it up as much as that particular title. 

HFC: What are you working on now? Do you have interest in doing another feature, whether it's a documentary or something else?
AI: I've worked on various things and I also shot a short years ago that I'm still figuring out what I want to do with it. I would love to make something else. I would love to help someone make something else. I like being like a creative producer. I've done some of that this year. There hasn't been anything long term that has presented itself yet. I think when you get into a project like this, it's going to take years. You want it to be something that you're really interested in and that can hold your interest for those years. I guess for me, nothing has presented itself yet. Maybe I need to be looking out more for that.

It's funny, because when we talked to Laz, he says he gets recognized in airports and stuff like that. He calls himself "hillbilly famous" whenever we talk to him. He thinks we made it big, I think partially because of the impact that the film had on the Barkley and on him. But you don't see us in the film and that was intentional. It's just about the race. But the other side of that is that, career-wise, it's still such a niche film. 

TK: We are amazed at how many people have seen the film. But we don't know what that number is, right? We have no idea. But the flip side of that is that there's at least 8 billion people that have not seen the film. So, it still has a long way to go. It’s interesting because you start this project, and in the end you have this thing on the shelf. There's this physical thing that exists. But the more interesting thing to us is the experience that we had and the people that we met. Those are the things that inspire the most curiosity. So it winds up not being the physical thing at the end that was really the most impactful. It's the experience of going through it.

HFC: That's a pretty good summation of how the runners must have felt too. 
AI: Yeah, because they don't get a medal, and they don't get prizes. The reward is that you don't have to go out on another loop. The experience is the point.

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