Michael Moore on Death Threats, His New Doc and America’s Future
At least half a dozen people have tried to kill Michael Moore. But the attempt that really stands out in his mind is the guy with the fertilizer bomb back in 2004. “He was going to plant it under my house in Michigan and blow it up,” says Moore. “But one night he was cleaning his AK-47 and it went off. Neighbors called the cops, and when they showed up he had all this ammo, bomb-making stuff and a hit list, with me at the top. He went to the federal penitentiary.”
Not wanting to inspire copycats, Moore’s team worked hard to keep the story out of the press. But that didn’t stop an assailant on the corner of 19th Street and Broadway in New York who charged him with a sharp metal object (which ended up lodged in the hand of Moore’s security guard), or the attacker in Nashville who ran onstage during a speech and tried (unsuccessfully) to stab him with a knife. “In Fort Lauderdale, a nicely dressed man walking out of Starbucks sees me, turns purple, takes the lid off his cup and throws scalding coffee at my face,” says Moore. “My security guard took the hit and wound up with second degree burns.”
Few liberal activists have a stronger track record of infuriating conservatives than Moore, whose new movie, Where to Invade Next, hits theaters nationwide on February 12th. In recent years, though, the death threats and murder attempts against him have subsided — as has Moore’s ubiquitous public presence. His last documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, came out more than six years ago, and since then he has devoted his time to lower-profile projects, like renovating historic movie theaters in his native Michigan, launching his own film festival and writing Here Comes Trouble, a 2011 collection of essays and reminiscences.
Moore spent the six years between films in other, less pleasant ways, too: He endured the death of his father, divorced his wife of 22 years, and got sucked into a nasty lawsuit with movie executives Bob and Harvey Weinstein over profits from his hugely successful 2004 anti-Iraq War flick, Fahrenheit 9/11. (The case was settled on undisclosed terms in 2012 — “amicably,” according to the Weinsteins.)
“It’s a subversive and dangerous film because it pulls the rug out from [under] Fox News … I’m carrying the flag and trying to make the country a better place. They won’t want people to see it because it exposes the lie that is Fox News.”
But, Moore explains, the main reason that he sat on the sidelines through most of the Obama administration is simple exhaustion. “I was tired after Capitalism: A Love Story,” he says. “I said, ‘I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m not going to be the only one doing this. I want to be one of millions. I don’t want to be a leader.’ I also realized that I couldn’t just keep making these movies forever if we didn’t change the central problem, which is an economic system that was unjust.”
Moore was finally inspired to make movies again after witnessing the Occupy Wall Street movement and the beginnings of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. “A younger generation no longer saw ‘socialism’ as a bad word,” Moore says. “I just waited until people came a little more around to where I was, or what I’ve been saying for the past 25 years.”