00:00I mette Bob Zellner in New York City in about 83 or 84, and I made my first film, The
00:09War at Home, and from making that film, that documentary, I got to know a lot of other filmmakers in
00:19New York City, and one of the filmmakers was a cinematographer, and she said one day,
00:25you're from Alabama, you know, my new boyfriend's from Alabama, and I met Bob through her. He would tell me
00:33stories, maybe one story after the other about the Civil Rights Movement, and so many stories, dozens and dozens and
00:41dozens of stories.
00:42I mean, he went to jail 17 times. It just felt cinematic, all of his stories. And also, I wanted
00:54to make a film someday about the South I grew up in, to be able to say something about the
01:03South, about that moment in time,
01:06and to also make it real, because I could make it real. I can make real people. What I said
01:14after about 20 years, I said, you know, it came to me, the spring and the summer of 1961, that's
01:20the story,
01:21because it's got everything that I needed. But also, it was a film about a guy who was being transformed
01:32by the movement, by what he was seeing. He was being transformed by the racism, the violent racism.
01:45May 1961, when the freedom riders came to Montgomery, Alabama, and they were beaten in a very, very famous riot,
01:54in which the white people rioted against a handful of black people who came as freedom riders to integrate the
02:03bus depot in Montgomery.
02:07And Bob went down, ran down there, after the riot had begun, and began to pull people out. And for
02:14Bob, that was a major, major incident in his life.
02:21You know, it's one of these things that challenges you. Who are you? What kind of person are you? Where
02:28do you stand on this? Do you go through an incident like that, and then just walk away?
02:34Walk back to your life again? Walk back to your life again? And say, no, you know, I'll be all
02:40right. You know, this is not going to really affect me.
02:45But it does affect you, and it did affect every white person in the South. It did. That kind of
02:51hatred definitely affects you.
02:53And at some point, at some point, I think that you become aware of it, and you have to decide.
03:00You have to decide something. You have to decide what kind of person you are. You have to decide, if
03:05you're a Christian, you have to decide what kind of Christian you are.
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