#174 Direction w/ Michael Bonfiglio
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 15 June 2020
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Michael Bonfiglio is an award-winning filmmaker whose work as a director and producer includes May It Last: A Portrait of the Avett Brothers (2017), the ESPN 30 for 30 documentaries You Don't Know Bo: The Legend of Bo Jackson (2012) and Doc & Darryl (2016), and From the Ashes (2017). Mike joins Ben & Bob to talk about the art of making documentary films, how his work engages with the historical narrative, and how the coronavirus epidemic has changed filmmakers work.
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
The Road to Now is part of the Osiris Podcast Network.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Southern Songs and Stories is a documentary series on the artists, music, and culture of the South, |
| 0:15.3 | with interviews, songs, a good bit of history, and insights into how all of it fits together. |
| 0:21.5 | I'm your host, Joe Kendrick, inviting you to come explore the music of the South |
| 0:25.5 | and the artists who make it on Southern Songs and Stories. I'm Bob Crawford. |
| 0:42.9 | I'm Ben Sawyer, and this is the Road to Now. |
| 0:46.9 | Today, we're recording this in front of one of our live audiences here on Patreon. |
| 0:52.8 | June 14th, our guests for today, who will introduce in just a second, is director, producer, extraordinaire Michael Bonfiglio. |
| 1:00.9 | But before we started in light of what's been happening, we've been off the air for about two weeks now. |
| 1:07.1 | And Bob and I just wanted to begin by just saying that we stand with, we stand with the folks in the streets who are demanding justice, that we believe that, that this American promise that we were fortunate enough to have been at least told we had. |
| 1:24.2 | We believe in that. And we believe that we're the best when everyone has that opportunity. |
| 1:30.3 | During the I have a dream speech, Martin Luther King has one of the favorite, the best lines I think I've ever heard in any speech, and it's where he says, we've come here today to cash a check. |
| 1:41.8 | And what he meant by that was we're not asking for something special. We're not |
| 1:47.0 | asking for something we didn't earn. This was promised to us and this country has not made good on |
| 1:52.7 | that promise. So we stand here today and now we're standing here more than 50 years later, |
| 1:59.1 | still saying we need to pay on that check. And I think it's time we do |
| 2:03.1 | because we're all the best when the best of us can get to the top. Yeah, Ben, well said. And I think |
| 2:10.5 | if you look back to reconstruction, you know, I had a great talk with our friend Will Aykuff last week. And |
| 2:16.8 | Will is just a fascinating guy. He began a charity in Nashville, |
| 2:23.6 | Tennessee called Corner to Corner. And Will and his wife, Tiffany, have been working for social justice for, |
| 2:30.8 | I mean, for a decade. Living for social justice. |
| 2:34.4 | They're living social justice. |
| 2:36.1 | They moved into one of the hardest neighborhoods in Nashville, not to change it, |
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