Sidd Finch is one of the most endearing young filmmakers I have met in a while. He has an infectious energy, an enormous smile, and a down-to-earth Michigan quality that makes you want to root for him almost immediately.
He is also kind of a maniac. Sidd is the type of dude who decides he is going to make a movie and then simply starts making it, regardless of whether he has the money, the equipment, the experience, the legal clearances, or even a fully formed idea of what the movie is supposed to be. He follows his dreams with the confidence of someone who has not yet accumulated enough evidence to understand why said dreams might be fucking insane and/or just plain impossible.
Honestly, Sidd would make a great character in a documentary himself. Something in the spirit of Lost in La Mancha or Overnight: a movie about a young filmmaker from outside Detroit throwing his entire life into a project about a bull rider, dragging cameras and his wife across the country, learning every lesson the hardest possible way, and refusing to accept that the universe may be trying to tell him to give up.
I would watch that movie.
Instead, Sidd made a documentary about Matt Allgood, a down-on-his-luck bull rider from Michigan who is not especially gifted at riding bulls.
That is not my assessment. It is Sidd’s. I’m not qualified to rate bull riders.
Most sports documentaries are about greatness: champions, prodigies, people whose talent is so undeniable that the only question is whether they can overcome whatever obstacle has been placed between them and immortality.
Matt Allgood was different.
He was an underdog in the purest sense of the word: a guy from a place not known for producing cowboys, competing in a sport he was not particularly good at, climbing repeatedly onto two-thousand-pound animals that appeared determined to prove the point that his ass belonged in the dirt.
And Sidd loved him for it.
He followed Matt for more than two years, shooting roughly fifty days on whatever equipment he could get his hands on. He drove through the night to rodeos, edited footage between trips, borrowed gear, ignored basic production protocol, and spent approximately $10,000 shooting a badass feature documentary called 8 Seconds of Thunder.
And somehow, against all reasonable expectations, Sidd finished the movie.
He completed the edit, held some test screenings, received interest from an established producer and eventually, a well-known indie distributor offered to release it.
This is usually a happy ending.
For Sidd, it was a midpoint-false victory where the real struggle began.
Interview edited for clarity.
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