back on my feet. ...[A]t the point when she gave me her advice about how to use the camera, I experienced a minor epiphany." McElwee set out with just $9,000, and began conducting mostly impromptu interviews. "Pretty much I always walked in on them," he said, characterizing his methods. "I guess what my conversations have that conventional interviews don't is a serendipitous quality, and emotional charge that has something to do with the personal connection between the subject and the film-maker. I never came with a list of questions." The film ultimately cost $75,000 to complete. Principal photography lasted about five months, and, according to McElwee, "I'd guess the total amount of footage I actually shot was about 25 hours." The total "filming time" could be considered much more substantial, however: "I was almost always ready to shoot. I kept the camera within reaching distance, sometimes balanced on my shoulder ... Even between major portraits, when I was on the road, I was totally open to filming whatever might happen in a gas station or in a restaurant, or wherever. So in one sense you can count all that time as 'filming time.'" Reception In 1985, Jay Carr of The Boston Globe called McElwee a "Tarheel Woody Allen" and the film "like a series of variations on loneliness, funny and sad" but "never self-pitying." He "sustains its loopy absurdist tone, reveling in the post-Civil War ironies of the misunderstood Sherman, identifying with them." In a "NYT Critics' Pick" review of the documentary, Vincent Canby called McElwee a "film maker-anthropologist with a rare appreciation for the eccentric details of our edgy civilization"; the film, "which was made in 1981, is a timely memoir of the 80's. It's also a very cheerful recollection of the kind of self-searching, home-movie documentaries that Jim McBride, the director, and L. M. Kit Carson, the writer and actor, satirized so brilliantly in their fiction film, David Holzman's Diary. In 1994, McElwee told MovieMaker Magazine's Paula Hunt: The distributor of First Run Features saw Sherman's March at the IFP (the Independent Feature Project) in New York and immediately said he'd take it. I wanted to shop around a bit, because it's a very small company and I wanted to see what else was available. I got turned down by every other middle-range distributor. I didn't even bother to go to the studios or the major distribution outlets.