MichaelMoore.com

A few minutes with Michael Moore

By Joe Williams / St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Michael Moore is taking his latest crusade directly to the people. On a recent afternoon, the documentary filmmaker unexpectedly called me at home to talk about "Sicko," his satirical analysis of the American health care system.

Moore's movies are routinely described as "controversial," even though it seems that most of the controversy is just the noise that's produced when he hits his targets. Following are some of his thoughts about public image and public policy.

Q: Earlier this month, CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta ran a report about "Sicko" that largely supported your reporting but also said you had "fudged" a few of the facts. Later, CNN admitted on its website that it was mistaken about two of its assertions. The correction got little attention, and the notion that your work was shoddy endured. How do you deal with things like that?

A: Welcome to my world and the world of most people who are well known. After what I went through with "Fahrenheit," I decided that when a media outlet said something about me or my movies that wasn't true, I wouldn't play their game — I would just post the correct information on my website, with footnotes so people could look it up for themselves. I trust that the American people are smarter than the mainstream media, just as I trust that they're smarter than their leaders.

Q: "Sicko" points out the United States is the only industrialized country that doesn't have universal health care. But let's play devil's advocate: What does the U.S. system do better than other countries?

A: We are No. 1 in ambulance response time. In an emergency, we get our people to the hospital faster than any other country in the world. But still, 51 percent of Americans who need to see a doctor don't go, because they know that once they get there, they can't afford the deductibles or the services that aren't covered by insurance. That doesn't happen in other countries.

Q: Speaking of other countries, I was at a screening of "Borat" at the Toronto Film Festival last year where the projector broke and you jumped out of the audience to fix it. Do you have skills that would surprise people who only know you as a documentary filmmaker?

A: I was a projectionist before I was a filmmaker. I started my own little art house in Flint (Mich.) in the mid-'70s. Every weekend I would show the Truffauts, the Bergmans, the Fellinis. That was my film school.

Q: How have you evolved as a filmmaker since "Roger and Me"?

A: I think a lot about everything I do and everything I put on tape, and then I spend a lot of time in the editing room. I think about how the audience is going to react. There's an old line by Woody Allen: "The audience is never wrong." So, I pay more attention to the art form than I do to the political message I'm trying to put out. I don't believe anyone will get the political message if I haven't made a movie that's an entertaining work of art.

Q: You must get inundated with proposals. Why did you choose to focus on health care?

A: I could have done any of a number of things to make the same point, but health care is a problem that all people share, regardless of their political stripe. I do get bombarded, every hour, with e-mails from people asking me to do films about this or that. What we need is not more films by Michael Moore, but more Michael Moores making films of their own and doing positive things in their own communities.