Michael Moore on 'Fahrenheit 11/9'
documentary:
'Trump didn't
create the mess we are in'
@TheIndyFilm
The Independent Culture, independent.co.uk
October 18
2018
The filmmaker speaks to Geoffrey Macnab about his new
documentary, the ‘Trumpian’ times we live in and why he feels sorry for
Ivanka.
The director says he hopes the
film will remind people of the mess they are in – and of how they got there.
( Briarcliff Entertainment )
Michael
Moore wants to make one point very clear. In his new documentary
Fahrenheit 11/9, he is not comparing
Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. The film includes archive material of Hitler in
full, deranged demagogue mode, giving an eyeball-rolling, arm-waving performance
in front of the Nazi faithful – but out of his mouth come words spoken by the
Donald.
“People said to me you’re comparing Trump to
Hitler,” says the 64-year-old filmmaker, author, comedian and activist,
in London for the documentary’s UK premiere. “I said, no,
that is a scene where Hitler is speaking like Trump. I am comparing Hitler to
Trump, not Trump to Hitler. If you don’t understand the difference, I can’t
explain it.”
Obviously, says Moore,
Trump is not Hitler. However, in making the documentary, Moore drew on
Bertram Gross’s 1980 book
Friendly Fascism, which predicted that 21st century fascism wouldn’t come with
concentration camps and swastikas. It would come instead “with a smiley face and
a TV show”.
Moore first had the idea for Fahrenheit
11/9 when he was in London promoting his previous film, Where To
Invade Next, which came out in the UK last June, a few days before
the EU referendum. He travelled all over Britain, “talking
to a lot of working-class people, people who seem similar to me to the people I
live with in Michigan. It was clear to us by the end of the week that this thing
Brexit was going to pass. That sent a shiver down our spine.” To Moore,
the parallels with the then ongoing US presidential election were clear. “We knew we were going to see this six months from now except it
will be called Trump, not Brexit.”
“Here’s what we saw,” Moore
continues. “Brits who didn’t necessarily really want to
leave [the EU], yet the system had so failed them, the [political] parties had
so failed them, that Brexit represented a Molotov cocktail they
were being handed. They could throw it into the system and blow it up so that
somebody would listen.”

Fahrenheit 11/9 is a sprawling,
angry and often very funny film that begins with Trump’s election (and the
unlikely – and unwitting – part he thinks pop star Gwen Stefani
played in setting him on the trail to the White House). But
it also deals with school shootings, the poisoning of the water supply in
Moore’s hometown Flint in 2014, and the dirty tactics used by senior
Democrats to ensure that Hillary Clinton was their presidential nominee rather
than Bernie Sanders.
“We started out with a challenge to ourselves to not chase the news every day
so that it didn’t matter what Trump was doing,” says Moore. Instead of being about “Trump per se”, the film is intended to
look at the “Trumpian” times that we live in and to ask how on earth they’ve
come about.
“We got here not by Trump.
Trump didn’t create the mess we are in. When we get rid of him, we are still
going to have the mess. We are still going to have mass shootings, we are still
going to have people with no healthcare. The film became about the greater Trump
and the Trump that is us, as Americans.”
Moore
chastises liberals and Democrats for not taking Trump seriously enough, for
treating his political aspirations as a joke. “Just as you
here [in the UK] treated Nigel [Farage] and the crazy guy with
the hair.” (Moore
doesn’t specify the identity of “the crazy guy with the
hair” but Boris Johnson would be a good guess.)
There is a certain poignancy in Moore’s fighting talk. He has made films
about school shootings (Bowling
For Columbine, 2002) and the chaotic state of the American
healthcare system (Sicko,
2007) and in commercial terms, Moore
is the most successful documentary maker in history. Yet his movies haven’t
managed to change things. Gun law hasn’t been reformed. The American healthcare
system is still in a parlous state.
“To be honest, for the last few films, I’ve had to ask
myself ‘why’ and ‘what’s the point’,” says Moore, reflecting on the fact
that his movies, for all their popularity, appear to have had minimal social
impact. “But I am a filmmaker, not a politician. I am making
it for the art. First off, I want to make a great piece of cinema. If it can
help people to think, if they cry, if they laugh – all the things that any
filmmaker wants – I want those same things.
“Obviously, I have my
own politics, my own agenda in terms of how I hope it will help the country but
I can’t make people change or do the right thing,” he continues. “What I do know
is that over these 30 years [Moore’s breakthrough film Roger & Me, about the
closure of the General Motors plant in Flint, was made in 1989], there have been
enough young people who started watching my films at the age of 12 who are now
in their 30s and their 40s. They have different politics than their parents and
grandparents. Gradually, this will change. It is just not going to be
overnight.”
The new documentary includes a fascinating scene in which
Moore is shown on TV alongside his then friend Roseanne
Barr and Trump himself. They all seem to get on
famously. In 2018, though, the chances of these three sharing a platform seem
remote. Moore has fallen out badly with Roseanne (whose sitcom
on ABC was cancelled following her racist tweeting earlier
this summer). Moore speaks of the end of their
friendship with obvious regret.
In 2004, he flew around the US with Barr, campaigning for
John Kerry in the US presidential election against George Bush.
“I had days and nights with her and her family,” he says. They were very close
but something “snapped”. Barr started
taking increasingly right-wing positions. “Then, she started attacking me on
Twitter. I never attacked her back. On the day she was fired from the show, she
began that morning with four tweets, one attacking Valerie
Jarrett [Barack Obama’s adviser], another attacking me.” He responded
by posting a message referring to her as a “damaged soul”.
The
American director also has some intriguing observations about his former
business partner, the disgraced movie tycoon Harvey
Weinstein. In 2011, Moore famously sued the
Weinstein brothers over profits from his hugely successful 2004 documentary, Fahrenheit
9/11, about the presidency of George W Bush. The multimillion
dollar case was eventually settled. In spite of the dispute,
Moore had originally been planning to work with the
Weinsteins again on Fahrenheit
11/9. Then came the sexual abuse allegations and Harvey Weinstein’s spectacular fall from
grace.
Why partner with the Weinsteins when you’ve already had to sue them once?
Moore seems surprised by the question. After all, all they did was steal from
him. He was perfectly happy to work with them again as long as he had a better
contract and a better agent. “That’s Hollywood!” he
exclaims. “It was only money. If it had been other things,
had I ever seen Harvey behave in the way that has been alleged and what he has
been arrested for, oh my God, I would have had nothing to do with him. But this
was just common Hollywood thievery that goes on all the time.”
Moore’s view of Harvey Weinstein is nuanced. His obvious disgust at the movie
tycoon’s alleged behaviour with women doesn’t stop him from acknowledging other
aspects of Weinstein’s career.
After meeting
Ivanka Trump, Moore says he feels bad for her:
‘I think she’s a good person’
“Harvey raised half a billion dollars for [Aids charity] amfAR. The people at
amfAR, at least at the time, credited Harvey with being one of the key reasons
why they were able to fund the research and get the AZT inhibitor that
essentially means that anybody with Aids now is not going to die before his or
her time. That’s Harvey Weinstein. When the whole story is told, it is going to
be a very interesting story. You have the politically left
Harvey, who is right on all the issues. You have the Harvey who has saved tens,
even hundreds of thousands of lives as the result of the work he did to help
fund the research to provide medicine for people who have HIV. Then, you have
this new Harvey we have all learned about and that none of us knew.”
Moore has known Weinstein for years. When he was with him,
he says Weinstein never exhibited casual sexism. “In the almost three decades of knowing him, I never once heard a
comment like ‘oh, she looks good today’.” Now, he thinks Weinstein was
“purposefully covering up”.
There are disturbing moments in the new film in which Donald
Trump makes salacious remarks about his own daughter,
Ivanka. Moore has been unsettled by how
audiences have laughed at the scenes. “It’s so weird,“ he says. ”My editor and I
were like, ‘oh, they’re laughing. We meant this to be serious.’ But it is such a
late night comedian’s joke. People are so engaged in laughing at Trump, as they
have been since the beginning.”
Moore has met
Ivanka and reveals in the documentary that her husband,
Jared Kushner, was one of the backers of Sicko.
“I feel bad for her. I’ve met her and seen her at various
functions over the years to support the right to have gay marriage, Planned
Parenthood, all that stuff. She has always been really good about those things
and I think she’s a good person too.”
Trump’s “genius”, Moore suggests, is
that he does everything in “plain sight”. That makes him all the more difficult
to manoeuvre against. The elites on both sides of the American political divide
hate him – and that perversely adds to his popular appeal, too.
Moore isn’t under any illusion that his film is going to change
people’s minds about him overnight but he hopes it will at least remind them of
the mess they are in – and of how they got there.
He also knows precisely the audience he is trying to reach – those who voted for Trump as a protest against a
political establishment that was ignoring and humiliating them. “I don’t
care about the 20 or 30 per cent that’s way out there and are lost Americans,”
he says of the Trump supporters whose minds he hopes can still be changed. “I am
talking about the 70 per cent who aren’t lost.”
‘Fahrenheit 11/9’ is released on
Friday