Michael Moore on His Radical New Doc: ‘Let’s Invade Europe’
“I think people are expecting Edward Snowden to walk out on stage right now,” Michael Moore joked from the stage at the Toronto International Film Festival, in an introduction that doubled as a public apology. He understood that, when you name your latest project Where to Invade Next and slap a kitschy picture of the Joint Chiefs of Staff above your fest’s catalog blurb, it’s bound to suggest any number of things: a take-no-prisoners takedown of America’s military-industrial complex; a scathing indictment of our nation’s perpetual-war fetish; how the government sends its soldiers into war and then ignores them once they come back home. (These were simply the three most popular rumors about the movie leading up to its premiere; there were dozens of others.) The fact that virtually no one knew the 61-year-old cinematic muckraker was even making a movie until it was announced as one of the event’s opening night selections attests to how under-the-radar the project has been since he’d started on it last year.
As Moore sheepishly admitted to the audience, however, Invade is none of these things. “I’m not exposing NSA secrets,” he declared. “I have to say that out loud.” Rather, what the Fahrenheit 9/11 director presented was his own socially conscious variation on Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad. After a bit of misdirection involving the filmmaker being “summoned” by the Pentagon (sayeth the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the subject of occupying foreign countries: “We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing”), he tells the assembled brass that from now on, “I’ll do the invading.” So off Moore goes to numerous pictureseque places, examining things that our European neighbors do right: worker-friendly factories in Italy, a humane prison system in Norway, healthy school lunches in France, a different attitude towards the war on drugs in Portugal, tuition-free college in Finland and so on. He then plants an American flag in these countries, claiming these ideas for the good ol’ U.S. of A. — a satirical imperialism dedicated to pilfering progressive ideologies for “the common good.”
Despite the fact that Where to Invade Next has all the hallmarks of a typical Moore movie (rhetorical flourishes that lean to the far-left, ironic narration, a wicked sense of humor), his first new film since 2009’s Capitalism: A Love Story displays a kinder, somewhat gentler version of his usual gonzo style, one laced with a sense of uncharacteristic optimism instead of boiling-over outrage. The morning after the film’s premiere, the filmmaker — bleary-eyed and checking his BlackBerry as distributors circled to buy his self-produced movie — talked about why Americans should be open to better ways of doing things, why the “dinosaurs” and “performance artists” of the political right are courting extinction and
Was there a particular call-to-action moment that inspired this?
How about it’s just enough that it’d been a long while since I’d made a movie and I felt like making one? Why did the guy who made Birdman want to make a movie?
Okay, sure, it’d been six years — but let me rephrase this: You could have made a movie about anything…
…And I made a film about virtually everything. It was an attempt to make a film about the United States without actually going to the U.S. How do you show us without actually showing us? To quote a famous Canadian rock band: Why are we here? Because we’re here. [Pause] Roll the bones.