Michael Moore On His Penchant For 'Trouble'
Michael Moore didn't plan on becoming a filmmaker. As a teenager growing up in the Midwest, he considered documentaries to be a bit like broccoli: good for you, but boring.
Instead, he spent his adolescent and young adult years rabble-rousing. He was elected to the school board when he was a senior in high school, became a young supporter of Richard Nixon, and even flirted with the idea of becoming a Catholic priest.
But once Moore got around to finally making his first film, he stumbled upon a new kind of documentary: confrontational, comedic and provocatively political. Roger & Me, about the decline of Moore's hometown, Flint, Mich., was the public's first glimpse of the documentarian's often brash interview style.
Moore talks with NPR's Neal Conan about his new memoir, Here Comes Trouble: Stories from My Life; why he bristles at being called controversial; and how he feels about the current partisan mood in the United States.
Interview Highlights
On when he committed himself to standing up against injustice
"When you think back to those pivotal moments ... you're trying to figure out, 'How did I get here?' and sometimes they aren't big things that happen in your life. Sometimes they're very small events.
"And I had just been elected to the school board, but I still had a week left of school. So I was both a student and the boss — or one of the bosses — of the vice principal. We're standing there in line, getting ready to go up to the graduation ceremony, and he's coming down the line making sure each of the boys have a tie on underneath their gown.
"The boy in front of me, [the vice principal] pulls his gown down and he sees a tie, but it's one of those bolo ties ... And he yanks him out of the line, and he says, 'You don't have a proper tie on, and you're not graduating.'
" 'But sir, this is a tie, this is what we wear.'
"And he yanks him out, and he literally takes him out the door. And ... his parents are sitting up there in the stands — go through the whole graduation — their son never comes out. Later they find him curled up in the back seat of their car crying, because he didn't get to graduate.
"But what bothered me really wasn't so much what the vice principal did. It's that I was standing right behind this kid, and I said nothing. I didn't want to cause any trouble. It was my graduation night; I didn't want to get thrown out. And so I stood there in silence. And his mother called me the next day and said, 'What can you do?' And I said, 'Well, we can't re-run the graduation.'
" 'Well, did you see it happen?'
" 'Yes.'
" 'Well, what did you do?'
" 'Um, nothing.'
"And this just — this just did a number on my own conscience. And I just thought, I will never be silent again. And I stood there and said nothing. And I just resolved at that moment, at 18 years old, that I will not stand silently by when I see some injustice taking place, even if it is the smallest thing ... And so I was kind of a different person from that moment on."