Michael Moore on Trump, Blair and Brexit
Sheffield Doc/Fest, the UK's number one documentary festival, kicked off yesterday with opening film Where to Invade Next and a stirring Q&A with its director, Michael Moore, in which he had much to say about the UK's upcoming EU referendum
The 22nd Sheffield Doc/Fest kicked off last night with the latest from polemicist Michael Moore, a filmmaker who has done more than most to popularise nonfiction cinema. His 2004 doc Fahrenheit 9/11, an eloquent statement of rage at George W Bush’s warmongering first term as President of the United States, is still, by a wide margin, the most successful ever documentary at the box office.
His latest imagines that the US government, given its penchant for pointless and untenable wars (from Korea to Syria, via Vietnam and Afghanistan), has handed over foreign policy to him. Moore's plan is to invade the nations of Europe and pillage their social ideas rather than their hearts, minds and natural resources. He heads to Italy to steal their generous workers’ paid holidays (he’s particularly excited by the country’s 15 day additional paid annual leave for newlyweds). Finland points the way ahead for the US’s failing schools. He wants to adopt Norway’s forward-thinking prisons system which itself is based on the US constitution’s eighth amendment: “no cruel or unusual punishment.” He reckons Portugal has the right idea when it comes to treating drug use as a disease, not a crime. And from France, he wants to take their healthy four course school meals, which includes a mandatory serving of fromage.
It’s an interesting conceit but Moore’s naïvety that the grass is greener on the other side of the Atlantic quickly wears thin. There's no mention of Italy’s political corruption, for example, or Finland’s alarming suicide rate, or Portugal’s massive youth unemployment. Moore defends his rose-tinted look at Europe early on. “I’m here to pick the flowers,” he says, “not the weeds.” But to extend his metaphor, flowers only survive replanting if you take them root and all, and Moore simply doesn’t dig deep enough. Most of all, we miss the righteous anger that made films like Bowling For Columbine and Sicko so stirring. Like the Bond movies, Moore seems to only be as good as his villains, and with a good-guy currently in the White House, this celluloid vigilante has lost some of his bite.
“People should take Trump seriously”
Never fear, though. Moore is much more spiky in person during the post-film Q&A, chaired by fresh-faced firebrand Owen Jones. His added vigor is perhaps thanks to the new nemesis on the horizon who’s even more diabolical than Bush. “People should take Trump seriously,” says Moore, who’s wearing his trademark uniform of blue jeans and baseball cap. “Nobody thought he’d be the Republican nominee, look what happened. None of us thought George Bush would be president – or Ronald Reagan even. We’ve seen this happen many times so we are all taking this very seriously and we’re going to have to fight very hard.”
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On the whole he's hopeful, though, thanks mainly to the swell of support that built on Bernie Sanders’s Democratic presidential nominee campaign. “On one side you’ve a billionaire capitalist and on the other a democratic socialist who has 46% of the delegate vote. He’s won 22 states. A socialist in the US! Unprecedented. I think things are changing. Look at the way Labour is changing here, the fact that you have a democratic socialist now – this is all good forward movement, so I do remain an optimist.”
The UK now sounds “Trump-like”
Notable by its absence on his film’s whistle-stop tour of Europe is the UK. Moore is surprisingly frank to the Sheffield audience when he’s asked why we weren’t included. “We didn’t come to the UK because we thought there was nothing left to learn,” he says bluntly. “I’m sorry, but the fact that you participated in the Iraq war, that Blair gave Bush coverage – Bush would have had a harder time convincing Americans on Iraq if he didn’t have Tony Blair by his side. Bush was able to say, ‘It’s not a right-wing idea. Look, we've got Tony Blair.’
“But also,” he adds, “look what you’ve done in terms of college tuition and all these other things that your government is trying to do to make life worse here. I mean seriously: who’s in charge here? And why are you sounding so, dare I say it, Trump-like. What is this nationalism, this hatred of immigrants, this fear of the other?”
Moore on Brexit: “It’s such a bizarre idea that you would vote to leave”
Moore saves his most passionate responses for questions related to the upcoming EU referendum. It’s as if, having made this cinematic love-letter to European social values, these last few days promoting it in Eurosceptic Britain have boiled his blood. “You’re such an important force in this world,” he says of the UK. “The fact that you would want to go back to the old days where you would say, ‘We’re just an island. We’re going to pull up the drawbridge and to fuck everybody else.’ It’s like, wow, that doesn't sound like you.”
Right-wing commentators in the States have always liked to claim that Moore’s criticism of America means he hates his own country. Moore throws the same charge back at the growing faction who want to change the status-quo and see the UK leave the European Union. “If they really believed in Britain, they would say to themselves, ‘Well, you know, we saved Europe. We sacrificed tens of thousands of lives to save it, and the Europe we have today is the Europe that was created by our country.’ The world and Europe owes a real debt to the UK. Why would you want to abandon the very thing that you helped save, the Europe of the 21st century that we have now? It’s not for me to say, I don’t live here, but it’s just such a bizarre idea that you would vote to leave.”
Where to Invade Now is out now via Dogwoof
Sheffield Doc/Fest runs until 15 Jun