MichaelMoore.com

Entertainment Weekly: The Passion of Michael Moore

By Daniel Fierman / ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

July 9th, 2004

Michael Moore is a dangerous man. You wouldn't know it to look at him--sprawled sockless, scruffy, and wearing a "Made in Canada" cap on a couch in his Manhattan offices--but he is very, very dangerous. Because Michael Moore is a man who is trying to unseat a President. -- Starting with Florida and twisting its way through the war in Iraq, Moore's new movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, by turns humiliates, condemns, and brutally diminishes the President and his inner circle. It's a polemic that fails to mention the name John Kerry once but leaves no doubt as to whom the director thinks should be our next leader. (See review on page 60.) The politics of Fahrenheit are no shock to anyone who has read Moore's best-selling books, watched his documentaries, or sat down with a DVD of his TV shows. The surprise was that Fahrenheit won the Palme d'Or in Cannes. That it survived a bruising fight between Disney and Miramax. And most of all, that it soared to the top spot at the box office with $ 24 million and broke all kinds of records. By June 28, Fahrenheit was the highest-grossing non-concert, non-IMAX documentary of all time (besting Moore's last movie, the Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine) and the only one ever to win a box office weekend. -- Other than Harvey and Bob Weinstein--who bought back Fahrenheit when Disney dumped it and are presumably busy rolling naked in money at the moment--no one knows what to make of the phenomenon. Right-wing advocacy groups are trying to use federal campaign finance laws to force the ads for Fahrenheit off the air and out of print after July 30. Liberal organizations are marshaling supporters to go see the movie. Conservative critics are howling about errors and malicious omissions. Nobody is sure if it will make a difference in the election--but with the race so close, the number of undecided voters so small, and the bases of the Republican and Democratic parties so rabid, it doesn't seem impossible. -- Ever the giddy bomb thrower, Moore, 50, sat down with EW for his most candid and extensive discussion yet of Fahrenheit and its controversies.

EW: You had to be really disappointed by the opening-weekend gross, right? You almost got beat by White Chicks.

MM: [Laughs] I was thinking 10 million. Twelve, maybe. It's like if this week the No. 1 album on the Billboard chart was a compilation of Bulgarian folk music. That can't happen! The pundits were saying that only the Bush haters would see this film, and it's No. 1 everywhere. The red states and the blue states.

EW: Let's go back a year. Tell me about the reaction right after you gave your infamous Oscar speech when Bowling for Columbine won, when you were booed for calling Bush a "fictitious President."

MM: From the second I walked off the stage, I felt alone. People backed away from me as I walked through the wings. The only two things that were said to me were the things that every Oscar winner hears when you first walk off the stage. There are two interns standing in the wings in evening gowns and one goes, Champagne? And the other one goes, Breath mint?

EW: What was the fallout?

MM: For the next couple of months I could not walk down the street without some form of serious abuse. Threats of physical violence, people wanting to fight me, right in my face, "F--- YOU! You're a traitor!" People pulling over in their cars screaming. People spitting on the sidewalk. I finally stopped going out.

EW: When did you decide to try to take down a President in an election year?

MM: [Long pause] They hand me the Palme d'Or on the stage at Cannes and Quentin Tarantino comes up to me and says, "I think this is the first movie ever made to justify an Oscar speech." [Laughs]

EW: So was that your intention--to take down Bush?

MM: My intention was to make as good a film as I could make.

EW: But this movie is an explicit political attack.

MM: If you start out with that as your primary motivation you're doomed. Case in point: The Day After Tomorrow. Well-intentioned. Good politics. I saw it at 10 p.m. opening night and there was so much laughter that people started chanting "RE-FUND! RE-FUND! RE-FUND!" China Syndrome is the opposite. Well-made movie first, and then people were willing to open up and listen to the politics.

EW: Obviously there are visuals that we haven't seen before in your movie, but the political argument is pretty much already out there.

MM: Other than the James Bath stuff [about how Bush's friend and fellow Texas Air National Guard member connected him to the bin Laden family], which I got.

EW: Well, some Texas journalists had that too. But...

MM: ...right. Most of the stuff is already out there. That is correct.

EW: It seems to me that what you were trying to do was build the left's most sensational, potent case against this administration.

MM: My own motivation [was the thought that] we can't leave this up to the Democrats. It's too serious now. I mean, this is a party that can't even win when they win. They lose when they win, you can't get more pathetic than that. We have to save them from themselves.

EW Is this why you pushed for it to be released on June 25? And the October DVD date? To directly assist the Democrats in the election?

MM: Yes.

EW: A lot has been made of the fact that you're not in front of the camera as much in this movie.

MM: I'm not going to give you the popcorn pleasure of watching me throughout the two hours shoving a stick up every member of the Bush administration.

EW: I'd say you did that throughout the movie.

MM: I let them do that themselves. They have the funniest lines. I think a little of me goes a long way. I personally don't like to see myself blown up 40 feet on a movie screen. Nobody likes to have their picture taken, especially someone like me. And the last two years have been a somber time for me. It's not a response to the criticism or to soften my image. The material was strong enough, it didn't need me to nudge it along every five minutes.

EW: Talk to me about Lila Lipscomb, the mother of a soldier who died in Iraq. The story of her political conversion makes up roughly the last third of the movie. How did you find her?

MM: I didn't know her at all. In the first month or two of the war, I noticed that [some] soldiers had died from Flint. I said we should start calling some of [their relatives] and see if they'll talk to us. The first three people said they would, so immediately we were like, whoa, because military families tend to be more conservative. As we followed Lila's story for three months there was a really interesting arc, because she was essentially this conservative Democrat, very pro-military. And we saw this shift take place over a period of months, and so you see it in the film.

EW: So the first time you met her, her son had already died in that helicopter crash?

MM: That's right. It was a number of months after her son had died, I can get you the exact dates, but I just constructed it in such a way that you don't know he's dead until [later in the film].

EW: The first flash point for most people seems to be the footage of Bush in the grade-school classroom, when he is informed of the planes hitting the towers on 9/11. You are essentially imagining what Bush is thinking then. That's pretty audacious.

MM: It's in a satirical voice. Which one of them screwed me? Clearly he's not thinking that, but yeah, I'm imagining that in a satirical voice.

EW: How'd you get the tape?

MM: We called up [the school] and they said, "Sure we made some tapes!" Because parents wanted a tape of the President there. That's a home-video VHS that the teacher set on a tripod. And I'm telling you, we're being kind to Bush. You should see the longer version where I let it run for, like, three of the seven minutes. It is painful. Painful!

EW: There are people who are going to look for any threadbare weakness in the film. This moment seems like fertile ground for them.

MM: I'm ready for them. I'm really ready for them this time.

EW: Yeah, you've got [Democratic strategist] Chris Lehane, one of the meanest political advisers on the planet.

MM: That's right. F--- with me and I've got the chief motherf---er. And I also went and hired the former chief counsel and head of fact-checking at The New Yorker and then she brought in some fact-checkers. I said tear the movie apart and find something wrong with it. I've done this for my other movies, too. I've had virtually no lawsuits. Four books, not one lawsuit. Awful Truth, two seasons, zero lawsuits. TV Nation? Two seasons, one lawsuit, we won it. Bowling for Columbine, no lawsuits until the Oklahoma City bombers' brother sued us--remember when we go into the bedroom and the gun is under the pillow? A privacy thing. The Big One, no lawsuits.

EW: And Canadian Bacon! No lawsuits!

MM: You get my point. I don't get sued because my facts are correct. I libel no one. My opinions are my own and they may or may not be correct, but let's have that debate.

EW: A couple of questions about the criticism of Fahrenheit. People have pointed out that the Saudis left the U.S. after the airspace was open--the film implies otherwise. Richard Clarke himself took responsibility and said there was nothing wrong with their leaving.

MM: Well, first of all, we know of at least one Saudi flight that did leave after all the airspace was closed. It was a flight that picked up some Saudis in Tampa, flew up to Lexington, Kentucky, and picked up more Saudis. The St. Petersburg Times did a great story on it. So it's a legitimate question to ask how many other flights flew during that time. What your question is really about is my interpretation of the facts. No one is denying that there was special treatment given to the Saudis, and Clarke was doing what he was supposed to be doing as an employee of the White House.

EW: But he took responsibility for the decision that was made.

MM: But he went on the word of the FBI. It turns out later that the FBI only interviewed 30 of the 142 Saudis. It's my interpretation and opinion that that was not a thorough investigation. I mean, is anybody accusing me of saying something that isn't true? Or is it my interpretation of the events?

EW: People have problems with your portrayal of kids playing in Baghdad before the bombings. I get what you're going for there, that those positive images were never seen, but Saddam was a bad guy and there's nothing to that effect in the film.

MM: Who doesn't know that Saddam was a bad guy? The media did a wonderful job hammering that home every day in order to convince the public that they should support the war. For 20 seconds in this film, I become essentially the only person to say, I want you to take a look at the human beings that were living in Iraq in 2003. The ones that we were going to bomb indiscriminately. In those 20 seconds I show a child in a barbershop, a young boy flying a kite, a couple getting married. People having lunch at a cafe. Anyone who takes that and says that I'm trying to say that Saddam's Iraq was some utopia is just a crackpot. The New York Times reports that our air strikes that week were zero for 50 in terms of hitting the targets. We killed a lot of civilians, and I think that we're going to have to answer for that--whether it's now or in the hereafter. If you pay taxes and you're an American your name is on those bombs. They were human beings who were just trying to get on with their daily lives.

EW: But if you'd just taken a second to show that they weren't exactly living under the best circumstances, that would have defused this criticism from the beginning. Right?

MM: No.

EW: No?

MM: I refuse to participate in the brainwashing that the media was doing to the American public. I didn't need to state the obvious. Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five isn't criticized for not showing the horrors of the Nazi regime even though he shows that the people who we firebombed in Dresden were essentially old men, women, and children. Is he doing something dishonest or wrong? I know it upsets a lot of people in the media that I'm not playing ball, that I'm not showing the images that they showed. I know it's embarrassing to them because anybody who sees my film now knows that you were only presented with one side.

EW: What do you make of the filing with the Federal Election Commission to stop you from advertising the movie?

MM: If it happens, that means that Fox News Channel will have to remove all of their promos that show President Bush, because you can't advertise anything that shows a candidate. [Laughs] For us it would be like [advertising] Mission: Impossible without Tom Cruise in any of the spots. Bush is the star of the movie!

EW: Is it especially satisfying that the movie is a hit, given that Disney's Michael Eisner dumped it?

MM: No. Because none of this was ever personal to me. What I would say to Disney stockholders is "What is the fiduciary responsibility of a CEO who strikes a match to tens of millions--if not hundreds of millions--of dollars?" It was the freest money he ever had! He could have had a film that cost $ 6 million and is now on a track to make $ 50 to $ 100 million domestically!

EW: I'd like to talk a little about your public image. You are one of the most loved public figures in America, but you're also one of the most hated. There are books slamming you. An entire news channel takes shots at you whenever possible. In fact, there is an industry built out of firing vitriol your way. How do you weather that?

MM: Well, the vitriol is coming from wacky people, lunatics. I mean, who would listen to any of that?

EW: Half the country.

MM: Half the country is listening to this lunacy? I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't believe that.

EW: Well, half the voting population.

MM: The way I learned to deal with this is that there are two Michael Moores. There's the one that the right-wing lunatics have created. The fictional Michael Moore. The one that they just make stuff up about. And then there's me. So whenever I read something about me, I have a good laugh. I enjoy reading the exploits of the fictional Michael Moore who has a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and has, in the Daily News today, a hot tub on his balcony. Did you know that? I read that and I thought, That would feel good. [Laughs]

EW: So it's about a separation between yourself and a public persona?

MM: Well, it's a public persona that they created. It's not really me. Now, this time around, with my little war room and Chris Lehane and three lawyers, I'm going to start suing. If you libel me, if you knowingly tell a lie and do it with malice. I. Will. Sue. You.

EW: Bill O'Reilly recently compared you to Joseph Goebbels.

MM: [Sigh] This is really interesting, the night [of] the Super Bowl, Janet Jackson, big FCC thing, the breast and everything, Bill O'Reilly is on Geraldo's show talking about Al Franken. And he says back in the time of Andrew Jackson, if this were the old days, they'd just put a bullet in his head. [Pause] And that went out over the airwaves, no FCC, nothing. I mean, he's basically inciting some crazy person to shoot Al Franken. The night after the Super Bowl, Bill O'Reilly says, "You know I don't support the death penalty but I gotta be honest, I want to kill Michael Moore, I'd make the exception. I'd like to kill Michael Moore." You're crossing a line there. [Editor's note: O'Reilly actually said, "Well, I want to kill Michael Moore, is that right? All right? And I don't believe in capital punishment. That's a joke on Moore."]

EW: How do you deal with that?

MM: I talked to Al Franken about it, you know? [Pause] And I said, Should we do something about this? We were just kinda laughing about it, like if anything happens, our next of kin can sue O'Reilly. And then I said, Essentially he's issued a fatwa against us, and seeing as he's talking about the Old West and all that, I think we have no choice but to kill him first! [Laughs] "He said...LAUGHING."

EW: What happened with O'Reilly at the screening in New York?

MM: He walked out. The funny thing is I had just run out into the lobby for a few minutes and I was coming back in and here he was coming out! And he was SHOOOOCKED. And I just grabbed his hand and said, "Whereyagoin'? The movie's not over." He goes, "AWWGGH! I gotta tape something!" But I thought right then, here's my chance! If only I had that rustler Al Franken with me.

EW: The hard right likes to call you a "traitor" or "anti-American." I think a lot of it comes from the fact that you say these things overseas that can be pretty harsh about your countrymen. Like when you spoke to a British audience and referred to "this country of mine, which is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe."

MM: I say the same thing here. Most of us know that for a country that has such incredible ideals, we have not lived up to them in many ways. The patriotic thing to do is to aspire to [make] this country the one that our founding fathers thought it should be. Anybody who works hard to do that, whether they're conservative or liberal, is doing the work of a true American. I would never call anyone on their side unpatriotic or traitorous.

EW: You called Bush a deserter.

MM: But he did.

EW: [Laughs]

MM: What? I mean, look at the legal definition! Under 30 days is AWOL, over 30 days is a deserter. He didn't show up--depending on what story you read--anywhere from eight months to a year and a half. I would never say that he hates America or that he's a traitor. And this is a man who, you understand, lied to a country in order to take them to war. That may be criminal! So they better come up with something better than that I somehow slander Americans. Seriously.

EW: There's a lot of stuff we haven't seen before in this movie. Wounded civilians, recuperating soldiers, casualties. How did you get it?

MM: I realized early on that we were going to have to do an end run around those at the Pentagon and the way they were stage-managing the news. They successfully got the networks to drink the Kool-Aid. Some of it was from freelancers who were already there. Some of it was from freelancers we sent there. Some of it was from people who were there who we gave cameras to. Some of it was from foreign news. And some of it was from people in the American news media who were disgusted by how the news was being censored and filtered and that Americans were only given one view of the war.

EW: Is that where the footage of Bush after he addresses the nation on the golf course comes from?

MM: Correct. Because a deal is made and this is what the deal is: Bush is on the golf course. So they allow a pool camera in only to film the statement he's going to give. Nothing before or after--and if you do film [before or after] you're not to use it. And publicists from the White House will stand blocking the camera before the statement starts and then move right back in to block the camera when it's done. But by the summer of '02 the media had been so complicit in presenting a good face on Bush [that] his people had started to relax, because they knew that the media would censor themselves. And so, sure enough, on the night when that ran, "A message to all terrorists!", everyone had the rest of it and nobody ran it. Because of this implied agreement that we're going to protect each other, Bush feels comfortable enough making a crack like that. ["Now, watch this drive!"] It's like the Marine recruiters that we show? To do that we had to get permission from the Marine Corps. So we called Marine Corps headquarters and I don't even have to get to the point of saying this is Michael Moore's film, because they don't ask. They just make the assumption if media is calling saying they want to film some recruiters doing their job, well, that's a positive story!

EW: You were one of the first Americans to see the sexual-abuse images.

MM: My first thought was, Why haven't I seen this? The networks are over there every day. Think about this! They've got millions of dollars, they have tons of reporters and cameras, and are you telling me that one of my little freelancers just happened to stumble on, not in the prison, but out in the field, four or five soldiers taking turns touching the erection of this Iraqi under this blanket? That they see this erection under a blanket and they take turns humiliating him? Now, if we caught that randomly, you know it's going on all the time.

EW: Did you get the footage of the sexual abuse before or after the prison scandal broke?

MM: Before.

EW: Why didn't you make it public? Or at least give it to the government?

MM: I thought, What should we do? We don't have a show, we're not going to give it to these networks. They're all cheerleaders for Bush.

EW: Do you really believe that?

MM: There's not a single network I would give this footage to and expect them to handle it properly.

EW: But isn't there a chance that you could have stopped this earlier? Don't you have to take that chance?

MM: It's funny, you know, it's kinda damned if you do, damned if you don't. If I had released this before Cannes, they would have all said that this is a publicity stunt for this movie. And now they're killing me that I waited.

EW: When you apply for credentials, do you identify yourself?

MM: We don't say Michael Moore, and we don't lie if anyone asks, "Is this Michael Moore's film?" Of course, nobody ever asks, because everybody is happy! And supports the war! Take that military contractors' conference in Virginia. We go there and we think that there's gonna be a ton of cameras and we get there and we're it. This is incredible!

EW: Were you influenced by the late journalism of the Vietnam War?

MM: Well, I saw that stuff in real time. [Pause] Nine guys died from my high school. That war, of all the political events of my lifetime, had the most profound impact. And I carry it with me to this day. That our government would actually sacrifice the lives of 58,000 of our people for nothing immediately makes you suspect when the government says it's time to go to war again.

EW: And you were affected by the TV news coverage at the time?

MM: Absolutely. And why aren't we seeing this now? Because if you show this to the American public every night while they're eating dinner they might turn against the war. And so the MPAA gives me an R rating. Images that we used to see on television at 6:30 are now considered an R rating? I mean, that's why I got the R.

EW: I have to imagine that you anticipated this kind of controversy. After all, it's true that Eisner warned you that he didn't want to make the movie a year ago, right?

MM: Disney sent the check every month. Yes, they told my agent a year ago that they were mad at Harvey for doing this film, but Eisner just made it sound like he was mad at Harvey, like he usually is. And I told Harvey about it and he said [in gravelly Weinstein voice], "Yeah, ignore him. Just make a good movie. Eisner sees a good movie and he'll love it because he'll know he can make money."

EW: But this has helped the movie. You got a ton of free publicity. You can understand why people suggested this was a stunt.

MM: I didn't need this. No filmmaker wants to hear eight weeks before their film comes out that they've lost their distributor. And I read everybody writing, "They'll have a new distributor in days! They'll be lining up around the block." Yeah? Well, days went by and there wasn't anybody lining up around the block. Then I win the prize in Cannes and I still don't have distribution. It had a chilling effect, what Eisner did. It made other people nervous. Nobody wanted to go up against their corporate parent. A few weren't scared.

EW: Like who?

MM: Paramount wasn't afraid. [Paramount execs] Sherry Lansing and Rob Friedman were right in the thick of this. And Sherry Lansing, when I walked into the Governors Ball with my Oscar, you could hear a pin drop, and she was the first to give me a huge hug.

EW: What's the next movie?

MM: I go after these HMOs and these pharmaceutical companies. The style of the film is like Run Lola Run. I don't know if I can run that fast for hours, but I just thought, What if we were just relentless motherf---ers, because I can't think of anything more evil than these HMOs. We try to see how many lives we can save in 90 minutes.

EW: Ever worry about your tone? I mean, this guy is the President.

MM: I understand what you're saying. He is the President of the United States. Look, here's a good example of how I feel about this. A couple of weeks ago, out here on Broadway, a guy comes up to me and says, "I'm a Navy surgeon. And I was on a ship off Iraq the night you made your speech at the Oscars and I was very angry at you. I remember yelling with the others at the screen. Now I just want to apologize. You were right. You were telling the truth." And I said, Listen, you don't owe me any apology. Apologize for what? That you believed your Commander-in-Chief? That you believed the President of the United States? Why should you feel bad? You should believe the President, because if we can't believe our President we're in deep trouble. You don't have to apologize for anything. In fact, I want to thank you for offering to risk your life to defend us. I think it would make the founding fathers proud to see the country still survives in their first belief, that's why it's their First Amendment, that somebody has the ability to express themselves and criticize the top guy. That's the country they created. That's the country that gave us Mark Twain, Will Rogers, and Groucho Marx. And that can't be anything but a good thing for America.