Unbeknownst to the world, Michael Moore has secretly been preparing a new film called “Where to Invade Next” — his first documentary in six years — which will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival this week.
Luckily, a new Michael Moore film means a new Michael Moore press tour, which gives the irascible director an opportunity to weigh in on everyone’s favorite topic du jour: Donald Trump.
“I think to have a president who is married to an immigrant would be a wonderful thing,” joked Moore to Entertainment Weekly. "It would show his love of immigration. I believe she’s from Slovenia, and a graduate of the University of Ljubljana, Mrs. Trump. So I think he’s certainly showed his love of immigrants. The thing about Trump is, you remember that movie in the ‘60s called Fantastic Voyage, a crazy hokey film where Raquel Welch and some scientist take a miniaturized submarine into this guy’s body to battle the evil things that are killing him? If I could just go inside Trump’s brain for just a couple hours and turn the hate button off. [Laughs] Did you see the poll last week where he polled with Hispanics? They recorded him as a negative.”
“See, I think people love bat-sh*t crazy. I think that that’s just us loving entertainment. You know, Stephen Colbert did that character. He was playing bat-sh*t crazy Bill O’Reilly. This is actually Trump. This is not performance art.”
Moore also gave some hints about the new film, which is, per EW, “a new satire of the American military-industrial complex that perpetuates a form of infinite war.”
Moore says the idea for the film has been germinating for 20 to 30 years, although he is reticent to give too many details, “I don’t want to say a whole lot about this until people see it, because it’s not what you think it is,” he explained. He did reveal that the film is somewhat of a follow-up to Eisenhower’s warning about the rising military industrial complex back in 1961: “It basically gets to show you what happens when we didn’t heed his warning,” he explained. “Not specifically about war — I’m talking about what did we lose in the process. What did we lose of ourselves and where did it go? The movie kind of answers that question in a very funny and provocative way. “
Moore says he kept the filmmaking process largely under wraps until recently because he wanted to avoid the social media hype machine. As he put it, “decided to unplug ourselves from social media, publicists, from the hype machine, and just do our best to be artists, do our best to be filmmakers. What kind of film would we make if we disconnected ourselves from all the noise? And that felt really good.”
Read the rest of the interview over at EW, and then nab yourself a flight to Toronto to catch the premiere at TIFF tonight.
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