Interview: Michael Moore

Published on Wednesday 23 September 2009 18:57

THE Toronto Film Festival has been friendly territory for Michael Moore ever since 1989, when he was hawking his first film, Roger & Me, about how General Motors abandoned his home town of Flint in Michigan. Still living on weekly unemployment cheques of $98 (about £60), he was a surprise winner of the festival's People's Choice Award and his unlikely career rise began.

Since then, in films including Fahrenheit 9/11, Bowling for Columbine and Sicko, his hulking figure shambling towards company executives and bewildered security guards has become the post-industrial version of Chaplin's Little Tramp. His new film, Capitalism: A Love Story, which premiered in Toronto earlier this month, is not a sortie on a particular industry; it is a frontal assault on the very idea of American free enterprise – a beast, as he described it to his Toronto audience, which "you can't tie down with a flimsy piece of rope".

For his Canadian audience that is a message that goes down as easily as weak American beer. In the United States, Moore's conservative critics may decry his popularity, but his films and best-selling books are far more popular outside the country, especially in Britain, Europe and Japan. In such places Moore has become something of an anti-cultural ambassador – the prism through which a large part of the world views the US.

But a film that flatly concludes that capitalism is evil is certain to put Moore at odds with most of the left wing in his own country – even President Barack Obama, who gave a speech on Wall Street the day after the Toronto screening on the need to re-regulate, not replace, the financial industry.

"I don't think they like a guy who is hovering around 300 pounds, who comes from a factory town and talks like where he comes from," Moore says over lunch in Toronto, the day before his film's premiere. "People want to have polite conversation at their wine-and-cheese functions."

In private conversation, Moore speaks slowly and softly. Wearing a black Ralph Lauren T-shirt under a dark jacket, his head bowed over his plate of pasta, he could pass for a kindly Jesuit, even while trying to dab at the tomato sauce spilled down his front.

For someone who has often been accused of playing fast and loose with facts, he seems to have an almost pathological precision about dates and specific incidents, framing sentences with "the first reports came across the wire on Saturday morning in Traverse City, Michigan" and "Dana Milbank wrote about this on page 10 of The Washington Post".

He decided long before last year's financial meltdown that his next project would focus on what he saw as the central thread of all his films: how greed and short-term thinking were undermining the middle-class life he knew growing up. And he decided to reverse his usual filmmaking process by making the argument first, then collecting his material.

"While I was making Sicko I began to think: 'I've been doing this for 20 years,'" he explains. "How many more films can I make when I'm talking about the car industry or Halliburton or the insurance industry?' And I was thinking, 'What if this would be your last documentary?' Well, I wouldn't pull my punches."

As much as Moore sometimes plays a comic-book version of class warrior – Left-Thing versus the Republic of Fear! – his politics are not grounded in class as much as in Roman Catholicism. Growing up in Michigan, he intended to go into the seminary, inspired by the priests and nuns who, at least until Pope John Paul II, inherited a long tradition of social justice and activism in the American church.

"The nuns always made a point to take us to the Jewish temple for Passover seders," he says. "They wanted to make it clear that the Jews had nothing to do with putting Jesus up on the cross."

Along with a moral imperative, Catholicism also gave him a method. Moore idolised the Berrigan brothers, the radical priests who introduced street theatre into their activism, for example, mixing their own napalm to burn government draft records. Their actions were a form of political spectacle that, conceptually, is Marxist – workers seizing means of production and all that – and has it influenced some of Moore's best-remembered stunts.

The central conceit in Roger & Me was his futile pursuit to interview the chief executive of General Motors, Roger Smith. And in Sicko, he took ailing rescue workers from Ground Zero to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because detainees there were receiving excellent healthcare. "Although I'm trying to say things I want to say politically, I primarily want to make an entertaining movie," he says. "If the art of the movie doesn't work, the politics won't get through."

To make sure the politics do get through, Moore invokes the privileges of better-financed producers and does market research. Jim Czarnecki, a documentary filmmaker who has worked with Moore for years, remembers screening Fahrenheit 9/11 on eight consecutive Tuesday nights for select audiences, gathering feedback and re-cutting the film. "We discovered what was clear, not clear, what worked and what didn't," he says, adding, "Michael works hard to craft his movies for a large audience."

But while Moore's obsessive reworking produces results, it can also exasperate his collaborators: the day before the screening of Capitalism… he went to his sister, Anne Moore, who produced the film, with a new idea for cutting a scene. She looks slightly exhausted in telling the story, then adds: "But it was a good idea."

David Johnson, who produced Michael Moore Live!, a one-man London stage show which ran in 2002, says that Moore would often rewrite the script in the morning, then deliver the new version "word perfect" that night. He adds: "There is a frantic element that surrounds him. Obviously, it's something he requires. It is emotional and sometimes spins out of control. But he's also the first to apologise and that's unique."

Moore admits that his frenetic work habits are also therapeutic. In the last few years his moods have wavered between what he calls "passive despair" and outright anger. The work, especially the humour writing, he says, keeps him "from finding out what's on the other side of that anger".

There are fewer of the trademark Moore stunts in Capitalism…, a sprawling 126-minute film that tries to connect data points across the economy, including the bank bailout; financial deregulation; privatised juvenile detention centres; the collapse of the American auto business (again); "dead peasant" insurance policies; Goldman Sachs' influence in Washington; the crash of a commuter jet in Buffalo; the Florida housing market and an old-fashioned sit-in at a Chicago door-and-window factory.

In part the stunts are harder to pull off for a famous, rabble-rousing filmmaker. But at the movie's heart is the original footage Moore's team took of workers inside the occupied factory in Chicago and of homeowners being evicted. In one scene, the neighbour of an evicted family in Florida argues with the enforcer sent from the bank, telling him that if too many people are locked out, "the value of everybody else's house goes down". That, on a more vast scale, is precisely the rationale offered by the White House for the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street.

"(That's] one of my favourite lines in the film, and I hoped it would provoke a reaction," Moore says. "The bailout in and of itself – the idea of protecting people's pension funds and hoping that everything doesn't go down a rat-hole – that's not a bad thing. It's the way it was done."

When it comes to the question of how exactly it should be done, the film gets a little blurred. Although he likes to quote Scripture, saying that the rich man will have a hard time entering into the kingdom of heaven, Moore doesn't offer a specific marginal tax rate that might at least inch him along. Instead Capitalism… tugs on the familiar autobiographical thread of Moore, the product of a middle-class upbringing spurned by the corporation and the system his family helped to build.

This theme – class warfare as unrequited love – runs through almost all his films, starting with Roger & Me, which can be read as a kind of screwball comedy with Roger Smith in the Irene Dunne role of unattainable idol. As Iggy Pop sings in the Capitalism… theme song – a version of Louie, Louie that was specifically created for the film – "the capitalists just break your heart". After the screening in Toronto, Moore took questions from audience members eager to know exactly what they should do. He offered some broad suggestions, stressing that he worried Democrats in the US would begin to abandon Barack Obama (whom he enthusiastically supports) now that the election is won.

Pushed harder on the subject of Obama, a gradualist seemingly out of step with Moore's radical agenda of scrapping capitalism, Moore only said that he hoped for the best, but feared the influence of Goldman Sachs on the administration. Finally, he just shrugged. "You know," he said, "the next movie may be about him."