Interview: Michael Moore On Sicko

By Ian Spelling on June 27, 2007

Michael Moore is at it again. The Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker who masterfully stirred passions with Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 and his television shows TV Nation and The Awful Truth, has turned his attention to America healthcare system with the June 29 release, Sicko. He skewers its flaws, its profits-above-all-else mentality and its knack for screwing the little (and poor) guy, and he makes the argument that there’s something to be said for socialized healthcare.
 
Moore is an incredibly divisive figure and he knows it. Christ, he thrives and even counts on it. To his credit, however, he states his argument and won’t back down, shy away or duck the controversies he creates. A recent press conference in New York City was typical. Moore walked into a hotel room to face a press contingent seething that he was 45 minutes late, yet he apologized, explained what happened and proceeded to answer any and all questions. Later, when the film’s publicists tried to end the session, Moore insisted on staying and answering several additional – and particularly pointed and adversarial – questions. Latino Review was on hand for the press conference and following are excerpts from the conversation.
 
Michael Moore:  Now the problem is with these documentaries is if I’m with actors in the film, they could help do some of this, right? But it’s just me!  And so they set up 30 things to do in a day and I guess I saw some of you earlier, right?  So you know what I’ve been going through. Believe me, I haven’t stopped for lunch. Those who were at lunch know that I didn’t have lunch, not that I need lunch. My apologies. Please forgive me for the behavior of the Weinstein Company. I will give only honest answers!
 
Do you think this film can really change things in America?
 
Michael Moore: I do these things in part because I do believe that things will change.  I believe that the American people, when they’ve had enough, do make their feelings known. I was thinking about earlier this year. The American people, without any kind of organization, without any kind of political movement or whatever, stopped O.J. Simpson’s book from being published. And (that) eventually resulted in the firing of the publisher. That was an amazing thing.  How did it happen? It was just because there was a mood, a feeling all through the country that they didn’t want this book. And they didn’t think he should profit. And they didn’t particularly care for publisher, who was going to publish this book. And suddenly, no book, no publisher.  How did that happen? Without any organization, money, PR, ads on TV?  Sometimes things happen when the people will it to happen. And I believe the American public has had it with this broken health care industry and system and they have been just waiting for the moment to rise up and demand change. I hope this film helps provide the spark for that.
 
A lot of people just don’t like you. Why do you think that is? Or they’re against the movie without even knowing what it’s about or having seen it…
 
Moore: Who dislikes me? Do you have a list? Can I see it?  What are their names?  (laughs)  Seriously, I feel like I’m in a time warp. If you’d asked that question the years ago, or how about ask me that question backstage at the Oscars in 2003, (then) that’s a legitimate question.  But now wait, you’re asking me that question in 2007 where 70% of the country now agrees with me and I agree with them. Seventy percent of the country doesn’t support Mr. Bush. Seventy percent of the country is against the war. I’m actually in the mainstream majority, which is a little weird. But that’s where I sit now. I don’t sit out on the edge; I sit here.  Four-plus years ago, I was booed off the Oscar stage for, in the fifth day of the war, daring to suggest that we’re being led to war for fictitious reasons.  People did not want to hear that at that time, I understand that. Eventually they came around and realized that what I was saying both on that Oscar stage and in Fahrenheit 9/11 was the truth. People remembered that in Fahrenheit 9/11 that three years ago I went to a place called Walter Reed Hospital to show how the soldiers were being treated. That was 3 years ago. The mainstream media didn’t deal with it until just a few months ago. That is the story of my life as a filmmaker. From General Motors, when no one listened then and now they’re near bankruptcy, to Bowling for Columbine, where we still now are faced with another school shooting a couple of months ago, to Fahrenheit 9/11. That is the way it is..
 
A cellphone rings and it’s… Moore’s
 
Moore: Hang on, that is my phone – I’m so sorry. You know who it is? It’s Ari Emanuel (who is Moore’s agent). You want to hear it?  Hello? Hey, I’m going to put you on speakerphone. Hey, Ari, you’re sitting here, on speakerphone, in a press conference with 100 journalists. You want to say hi?
 
Ari Emanuel:  Oh, oh, fuck.
 
Moore:  (laughs) Ladies and gentlemen, Ari Gold! (Jeremy Piven’s character Ari Gold on Entourage is reportedly based on Ari Emanuel)
 
Emanuel:  I’m gonna bite my tongue.  How’s the press doing?
 
Moore:  It doesn’t look like they fed them very well. Because I’ve always believed that a well-fed press tells the truth.
 
Emanuel:  I agree with that.  I completely agree with that.
 
Moore:  Would you like me to call you back later?
 
Emanuel:  No, I want to go over two or three things, if I don’t keep putting my foot in my mouth.
 
Moore:  (laughs) OK, Ari, thank you for joining us. Let’s give Ari a big round of applause. (Moore hangs up) Sorry.  It’s a risk to put him up to the microphone, believe me. That show was like a PG version of the real thing.  Sorry, I’m very sorry to waste your time on that.
 
You have said that documentary films are journalism and that you perceive yourself as a documentary filmmaker. Sicko is being marketed as comedy. To what degree do you consider this a comedy? Do you consider yourself, by association, a comedian?
 
Moore:  I consider myself a satirist and I think satire has always been considered a form of journalism. I mean, the Op-Ed pages in our newspaper years ago always contained great satire that Mark Twain would write and others likes him. Will Rogers. In the old days, people didn’t think humor was necessarily divorced from politics, opinions, journalism. My films are like the Op-Ed page and the Op-Ed page in a newspaper, I think is journalism.  It’s opinion based on facts. That’s what I produce in my films. But I’m also trying to entertain people and I respect, first of all, the fact that I’m making a film. I’m not running a political movement here. I’m not a preacher. I’m a filmmaker. So, first and foremost, I’m trying to make a film that people are going to love to go to on a Friday night, where they walk out of that theatre with an exhilarated sense of, “Wow!” We all feel that, don’t we?  Whenever we go to the movies, we wished we had this and how often do we get it?  Where it’s like, “Man, I haven’t seen anything like that in a while! That was something!” That’s what I’m going for. That’s what every filmmaker goes for.  And ultimately, that’s what I’m trying to do. If a few people are thinking about some of this, maybe doing something, all the better. I’m satisfied if they have a good laugh, or a good cry, get angry, whatever, leave theatre and feel like they’ve just seen something they’ve never seen before. When you go to my movies, you know that to be a fact.  I will take you to a place you never been before. I will take you on a boat into Guantanamo Bay.  You’ve never seen anybody sail a boat in the Guantanamo Bay. I will show you Mr. Richard Nixon, through his Watergate tapes, of nothing to do with Watergate, but actually talking about how these HMOs got their modern-day beginnings. You’ve never seen that before and that’s what happens in my movies. Thing after thing of stuff you’re not going to get on the evening news.  And I hope it’s funny, some of it.
 
What did you consider your starting point? How did you map out the ways you went through this? And what will happens if you become totally mainstream?
 
Moore:  (Laughs) I thought what I would do was what I did on my TV show, where we save this guy’s life by embarrassing his health insurance company into paying for an operation they wouldn’t pay for. And I thought, “What if we did 10 of those and made that a feature film?” That was the original idea. But then I thought, after we started doing that, you know, we’re only going to save 10 lives. Eighteen thousand people each year in America die simply because they don’t have health insurance, and God knows how many die with health insurance, as I show in my film. I started thinking maybe we should be taking on the larger system. Not just one company. Not just one person’s problems. So I made a conscious decision, in that process, to change the course of the film. And then when I asked for people to send me their stories over the Internet, well, I got a lot of stories from people who didn’t have insurance and what they’ve been through. The majority of stories were from people who had health insurance. The horror stories. The things they had to go through, thinking that they’re fully covered.  “Oh, yeah, I got benefits on this job. Full benefits.” You know how many times you’ve said that, if you had that kind of job? Wait until you get a severe illness. Wait to something happens and watch what the company does to try and not pay the bill because they can’t make a profit, if they pay all these bills.
 
Some countries have an excellent health care system.
 
Moore: You’re from Sweden?
 
Denmark.
 
Moore: Denmark. Sorry. Same thing to us, but go ahead.
 
We have an excellent health care system, but everyone bitches about it there. We have our own horror stories. Different horror stories. I was wondering did you find something that surprised you in a positive way about the American system? Was there anything that surprised you by actually working?  The second part is how do you think the film will be perceived in Europe?  In countries where we live with the assumptions that society should be judged on its weakest members?
 
Moore:  One thing that surprised me in a positive way while making this film is how many doctors now, in the United States, support socialized medicine. That did not used to be the case. They were the biggest fighters and opponents of it. They now realize that they’ve been had. They supported the HMOs in the beginning. They thought managed care, keep the cost down. Insurance companies said “You’ll make more money, we’ll make more money, we’ll all make more money by providing less care.” Well, really what the insurance companies were going to do was make sure the doctor’s didn’t get paid either. Not only the patient that can’t get their operations paid for or whatever. If you go to a doctor’s office in this country, if you went to a doctor’s office 30 years ago, there’s one person behind the window, taking your appointments, checking you out and all that, right?  Now they’ve got five or six sitting behind the glass window, doing all the paperwork, on the phone, hear them yelling and screaming at the HMO. Fighting to get a $20 bill paid. Doctors have been ruined by this system. They have been demoralized by this system. Now they are the biggest supporter of real change. That is a great thing to have happened. As far as how this film will do overseas, I think this film should act as a warning to countries like Denmark and other countries thinking of privatizing their system because they want to go to the American way. I want to say to you, I know you like us as people, right? As individuals, right?  Present company included, right? But I warn you not to go our way on some of these things, because if you go our way of creating a society of a bigger gap between the haves and the have-nots, and you have more and more have-nots in Denmark. As you have more haves-not, you know what your side is going to look like?  It’s going to look like us, too, in the other way, the bad way. You’re going to have more crime. You’re going to have more despair amongst those who are in the lower class, struggling to get by, scrambling for the few crumbs that are available. You don’t want to live in that society. You’re going to feel less safe in that society. Seriously, for your own selfish reasons, don’t go that way because you won’t be able to live the way that you’ve been living. I hope this film acts as an encouragement to those who have socialized medicine to maintain your systems. Fix them if they need to be fixed. They all have problems. Fix them, but don’t throw the baby out with bath water, as they say in this country.
 
There’s been lots of talk about your trip to Cuba. We know how the U.S. government feels about your trip to Cuba. The Cubans, especially the Cuban population in Miami, feel you portray Cuba in a kinder, gentler way. Could you talk a little about that?  Second, for your next movie, have you pondered the thought of perhaps tackling immigration, which is such a sensitive issue right now in the United States.
 
Moore:  First of all, when you say the Cuban community in Miami, they haven’t seen the film yet. So when they accuse me of doing anything, they’re accusing me of something they haven’t seen. So they should first see the movie. When they see the movie, they’ll see that, first of all, I hope that they’ll be happy that their relatives and their neighbors who still live in Cuba, at least when it comes to healthcare are being taken care of as best as possibly can be, considering that it’s a poor country. This isn’t Michael Moore saying this. All the world health organizations, all the different independent organizations have said that Cuba has a very good health care system, especially for an impoverished nation. So I don’t think that’s news really to anybody with me saying something like that. The important thing to remember here is that I didn’t go to Cuba. We left Miami to go to Guantanamo Bay. We were going to America.  We’re going to American soil, on the island of Cuba. We were going there because after meeting these 9/11 rescue workers who were suffering from ailments they received as a result of working at Ground Zero, I then saw one day, watching C-Span, Senator Frist going through a whole list of things of how well the Al-Qaeda detainees are being taken care of at Gitmo, in terms of the free universal healthcare and dental care and eye care and nutrition counseling that they received. House calls, colonoscopies, screening for cancer, etc. They were getting better healthcare than tens of millions of Americans. I thought it somewhat ironic that the people that are accused of plotting 9/11 are receiving better healthcare from our government than the very people who ran down to save lives on 9/11. It made absolutely no sense to me. And so, I decided to take these 9/11 rescue workers to our naval base in Guantanamo Bay. That’s what has upset the Bush administration. That’s what they’re really after because I’m going to tell my fellow Americans that the heroes of 9/11 had been neglected and ignored by our very government that says they are there for them every step of the way – which is not true. All these millions of dollars that the government put into the 9/11 funds, all the checks you wrote, I wrote, everybody wrote and we see these people suffering and dying, who ran down there and risked their lives? I am ashamed of that as an American. And most Americans will be ashamed of that.  That’s why we went down to Guantanamo Bay. Don’t ever question my patriotism. I am a patriotic American. The most patriotic thing you can do is to question your government, especially when they’re screwing up like they are, not providing health to our 9/11 rescue workers.
 
And the immigration question? Any chance?
 
Moore:  No.
 
The film has leaked out onto the Internet? How do you feel about that?
 
Moore: Let’s talk about that for a minute. The film that’s leaked on the Internet is not taken at a movie theater with a little home video camera, right? The way it’s usually done. This is an inside job. Now, if you were a police detective, one of the first questions you would ask is motive. Who has a vested interest in destroying the opening of this film? Who has a vested interest in ruining the opening weekend’s box office of this movie? If I was the police or FBI investigating this felony that’s taken place, that’s where I would look. Having said that, I’m glad people were able to see my movie. I’m not a big believer in our copyright laws. I think they’re way too restrictive. I just read Don DeLillo’s book, Falling Man. Wonderful book. If I were suddenly to take this out of my bag and hand it to you right now and say, “Hey, you should read this. It’s great,” would I be breaking the law? No. I’d be sharing something with you. I’m sharing a work of art with you. What happens is, if you like that book, there’s a very good chance you might go on Amazon.com next week and order three more of Don DeLillo’s books, because you got the free book from me. I’ve never supported this concept of going after Napster. I think that rock bands who fought this are wrong. I think filmmakers are wrong about this.  I think sharing’s a good thing. I remember the first time I received a cassette tape of a band called The Clash. I became an instant fan of The Clash and bought their albums after that, and went to their concerts and gave them my money. But I first got it for free. Everybody’s either young in here or you were young. That’s how it happens, right? So I don’t like what’s going on with this issue. But as a filmmaker, I made this film to be seen on a 40-foot screen. I don’t even like DVDs. Honest to God, in my lifetime, I might have rented a dozen DVDs, literally gone into a video store and rented a dozen DVDs in my lifetime because I don’t like to see movies that way. I like to see them on the big screen.  That’s how the filmmaker intended them to be seen. I really hope people will go see this movie on the big screen and sit there, on opening weekend, with 300 of your fellow Americans – yelling, jeering, cheering, screaming, laughing, crying and leaving the theater like, “Whoa, let’s go have a drink and talk about this.”  That’s the communal experience and that’s why the movies never die. They said television would kill the movies. It didn’t. They said VCRs would kill the movies. It didn’t. Now they’re saying this will kill the movies. It won’t. People want to get out of the house and go to the movies! Nothing’s ever going to kill that. And I hope people do that on opening weekend. But I really think as journalists, it’s worth a phone call to the people who have a vested interest in destroying the opening weekend of this movie.
 
So, who do you think it is?
 
Moore:  (laughs) I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But if I were a cop, right, that’s question one. Who has something to gain? I’m not talking about a kid going to the theater with a little video camera, putting it up there. This is the master. This is the actual digital. It’s perfect, OK? You can’t really get that unless you’ve been able to perform an inside job essentially.

Source:Latino Review

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