NPR
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.
