by Dan Georgakas and Barbara Saltz

Michael Moore made motion picture history when his first film,  Roger and Me (1989) became the all-time highest grossing documentary, the Titanic of its genre. Roger and Me’s success was all the more startling as the film exposed, however humorously, the economic havoc created by the closing of the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan. His new film, The Big One,  takes on even bigger game. While visiting cities on a national tour to promote his book, Downsize This,  Moore exposes corporations in each city that have posted record-breaking profits, but continue to downsize and to ship as many jobs as possible out of the country. Various  Fortune 500 corporations are skewered and  their cheerful public relations facades peeled away to expose their cynicism and complete indifference to workers. In the film’s climatic scenes, Nike CEO Phil Knight discovers why Roger Smith, then CEO of General Motors, avoided a Moore encounter.  Knight, feeling up to the task of besting the corporate basher, invites Moore to Nike world headquarters. When Knight admits he has never been to Indonesia and seen the children who make every Nike shoe sold in the United States, Moore buys two plane tickets so they can go together. Knight declines. When Knight says American workers don’t want to make shoes, Moore goes out and films workers in Flint who say otherwise. He returns to Knight to see if Knight will agree to bring at least one Nike factory back to America. Knight declines. In the interview which follows, Moore discusses why he considers humor to be so intrinsic to working class culture and why he thinks humor can be politically effective. The interview was a joint project of Cineaste film quarterly and New Labor Forum.

New Labor Forum: As a filmmaker, do you see yourself as an organizer, a muckraker, or a humorist with politics?

Moore:  I think of myself as mostly overweight. If I could organize anything, I’d organize myself back to the weight I was before I lost my job in 1986. When you lose your job, you sort of stop taking care of yourself. Some people turn to drink, I turned to the chocolate croissant.  But croissants aside, I think my work involves all of what you indicate, but those descriptions cannot be separated. The daily living is part of the art and the art reflects the politics and all of it is bound together.

New Labor Forum: Well, at the end of the film, it looks like Phil Knight, the Chairman of Nike, may actually agree to bring back 500 jobs to America. You seem to think that’s going to happen and you want it to happen. This is not about raising consciousness. The film itself has become a direct political intervention.

Moore: I didn’t think he would call me back a second time if he wasn’t planning to do something. I mean Nike is among the most savvy of all companies when it comes to marketing. They aim to replace Coca Cola as the most recognized international corporation.  I thought I’d been called back to film a segment that would enhance their corporate image. To me that was the smart thing for Nike to do.  I wondered if I was doing the right thing in allowing them to use my film to draw attention away from their labor practices in Indonesia and elsewhere in Asia. But I’m some sort of weird optimist. I thought  I was actually going to be responsible for getting a factory to move back to Flint. Nike could still do that, but as of now, they blew a good opportunity. Miramax is going to have postcards in all the theaters where The Big One  plays. People will be able to sign them and send them to Nike. The campaign is called: Just Build It. We also wonder if some competitor might one up Nike and locate one of their factories in Flint. Of course, this doesn’t resolve the problem that the Nikes of this world get to decide who works and who doesn’t, which teenagers in which countries get exploited.

New Labor Forum: That Nike guy came off as scary. He was not one of those capitalists who is going to fund public libraries.

Moore: I had to put up ten grand of my own money and challenge him to match it to get even a dime out of him. Ten grand for him is snot. We need to put on enough pressure to force him to bring jobs back to America. I would love to see union members get involved.

New Labor Forum: So you want to agitate a mass audience?

Moore: Absolutely, This is not an art house film.  We want people to be entertained by the comedy and perhaps get some cathartic pleasure in feeling that this is one for our side, this is a film that sticks it to the man. But I hope it’s an audience that will want to do something when it leaves the theater, whatever that something might be.

New Labor Forum: The targets in The Big One are the entire corporate culture as it now exists nationally and even internationally. The film is as funny as Roger and Me was, maybe funnier, but it seems even angrier.

Moore: I’m glad you think so. The best comedians used to be the people who were the angriest. Their humor was the flip side of their anger. I’m thinking of  people like Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl.  I think in silent films, in particular, the laughter usually involved sticking it to the man. The tramp getting over on the cop or fat cat. That’s because Chaplin himself was a very political person. He was very angry at the social condition and used his humor as a means to communicate his anger.  You don’t have much of that these days. I would prefer people leave the theater feeling angry rather than depressed. If you’re depressed, you can become paralyzed. You don’t want to go out and do anything to affect social change. If the humor in my films can help anger come to the surface, I’m pleased.

New Labor Forum: The Big One is definitely an Us vs Them film. Critics of the Left as well as the Right will probably complain that you are being too simplistic.

Moore: I hear this all the time. The people who complain that I’m being too simplistic have usually spent too many years in school. They didn’t complete their degree in the allocated time and they have been thinking about things a little too much. They forget that some things are quite simple. Let me spell it out. Murder: bad. Feeding children: good. Some of the left intelligentsia want to complicate matters because in part they love to hear themselves talk and in part they love the mental masturbation that goes on regarding theory. While I am not opposed to philosophical discussion, I don’t believe in reincarnation. I think this is the only time we have. I want to see change in my lifetime. I don’t have time to sit around and chin flap. In the film, I point out that we live in a democracy. We can pass any law we want. We can control those companies. We can pass laws to prevent them moving their profits from Detroit to Mexico City. We’re so beat up we think only they can pass laws for their economic interests. For a lot of people  this has turned into cynicism and defeatism. You have to remember that my  politics were not defined by going to Ann Arbor, Berkeley, or Madison. They were defined by living in Flint, the hometown of the world’s largest corporation and living in an environment created by the corporate culture that dominated that town. All of my feelings and politics result from that experience. Those of us who worked on Roger and Me are not the only ones to feel this way. Millions of people have that kind of experience, but they do not have access to media.

New Labor Forum:  Do you believe third parties offer some kind of relief?

Moore: Sure, they do. I have voted for third parties, but there is a big party out there for the taking. The religious right has moved on the Republicans at the grass roots. I think we could do the same with the Democrats. Local meetings are very poorly attended. You take a block of twenty people to one and you could take control of a county unit. I mentioned that in a talk I gave in upstate New York and I got a call a few months later that they had done it. A group had gone in and gotten all of its candidates chosen as the official slate of the Democrats. The party stalwarts have been forced to run their slate as write-ins. Things like that could happen all over America if we took democracy seriously.

New Labor Forum: Do you feel labor unions are part of the solution to our problems?

Moore: Yes, labor unions are definitely part of the solution, but some labor leaders are part of the problem.

New Labor Forum: Workers in your films say silly things and may act in a stupid or a petty manner. You do not put them on a pedestal and you do not idealize them. Some of your critics consider this patronizing and mean-spirited.

Moore: Well, Woody Allen can attack Jewish mothers, but if  Spike Lee did it, people would ask what he was doing. If you are African American you can use certain words casually that would be wrong for a white person to use casually.  I don’t know the social psychology of that, but you can joke about your own. That’s human nature. Pauline Kael took me to task for making fun of working people in Roger and Me. But those workers  are not  they, those workers are us. All the people in Roger and Me wanted to be in the sequel. We were not NYU film students on location. A lot of those people lived down the street from us. We were not laughing at those people. We were laughing along with them. We think people like us are funny.  I would say that people who are bothered by the fact that they are laughing at those working class people ought to investigate what is motivating their reaction.

New Labor Forum: Some critics contend that if Woody Allen is compelled to take so many jabs at Jewish culture, maybe deep down he is a self-hating Jew. They might speculate that deep down you don’t really identify with the working class anymore and maybe you even despise it.

Moore:  Back in the l960s we were the ones with a good sense of humor and the Right was uptight. Too many people fail to understand that in order to survive its situation, the working class develops a sense of humor. To laugh alleviates part of the pain. When people get upset about laughter, I think it indicates that they don’t have any pain to alleviate. If you are not on the way down the toilet bowl, you may not feel much need to be laughing, and you may not understand why others treat weighty events  with humor.

New Labor Forum: In the film, we see you using a computer to get information as you ride from one town to another in a van. What did that actually involve?

Moore: We signed up on Lexus/Nexus. We used that to find out about the town we were going to, the companies in that town, recent articles, all that kind of stuff. We also went to the Internet. We’d type in what we thought were key words. For instance, with Milwaukee, we started with the name of beer companies. Then on Lexus we’d get articles about layoffs and profits.  We’d also go to the company’s Web site. That was usually good for learning what the CEO makes. We didn’t know about Johnson Controls in Milwaukee until we got there. I was on a morning news  show and a bulletin was aired that  they were shutting down. So we just threw that segment together in a matter of hours. We had checks and other

gimmicks ready in advance with the name left blank. We’d fill them out as needed.

New Labor Forum: How do you come up with the gags? Do you have a writing team?

Moore; The ideas for The Big One just grew out of each event. There’s an ethnic dimension too. We are the product of Irish Catholic homes where there is a tradition of a dark and cynical view of life that comes from an experience that predates our arrival in America.

New Labor Forum: What about the American sources of your humor?

Moore: I was mainly affected by the humor available to my generation: Monty Python, Mad magazine, National Lampoon, The Great  American  Dream Machine of PBS, and NBC’s That Was The Week That Was.

New Labor Forum: When we walked into a press screening of your film, we were given a check for 80 cents. What was that all about?

Moore: I wanted all the critics to feel, at least momentarily, what it was like to earn Mexican hourly wages. We gave out 2,000 at the Toronto Film Festival. About 20 were cashed. I guess those were the cynics who were testing our sincerity. I think they missed the political point.

New Labor Forum: We understand that your distributor, Miramax, is donating half of its profits from The Big One to the same kind of projects you have funded with some of the profits from Roger and Me..

Moore:  We were sitting behind Harvey Weinstein when he first saw the film. He kicked the seat when Knight wouldn’t put the factory in Flint and muttered, “That schmuck.” As soon as it was over, he cornered me in the lobby and said he wanted to buy the film and would donate 50% of the profits. He didn’t hold a conference with his public relations people. He was operating from the gut. Look, the Weinstein brothers are working class guys from Queens who went to SUNY-Buffalo for their education. In their success  they have not forgotten where they came from. The old crowd in Hollywood will never fully accept them. They will always be seen as a thorn in the ass. So our donation of profits from Roger and Me touched something in them and  we can only hope that their generosity will inspire someone else. They have already put up $100,000 before the film even opens for community organizations in Flint.

New Labor Forum:  Will TV Nation ride again? We can think of plenty of situations that call for the attention of Crackers the Corporate Crime Chicken.

Moore:  I’m very pleased to tell you that Channel 4 in England has agreed to fund a new show of the same nature but with a different name. We will go into production in the summer of l998. We are now looking for an American outlet, but we are fully financed. The Americans won’t be risking a dime.

New Labor Forum: Do you have other projects our readers would be interested in?

Moore: We also have gotten a green light for a sitcom called Better Days. It is set in Wisconsin in a town where a factory has just closed and everyone is out of work. If this thing gets on the air, it will be the most subversive sitcom ever. It’s part of the effort to reach a mass audience with some ideas that should not be limited to a niche on the Left. Whether our critics believe it or not, we feel very privileged about what’s happened to us. We don’t take any of it for granted. We don’t think  we somehow deserve this in the sense that it’s owed to us.