A working-class filmmaker is something to be: an interview with Michael Moore.

• Author: Rampell, Ed
• Position: Interview

Michael Moore is the saint of cinema. Since he first burst onto the screen with 1989's Roger & Me, with his trademark wit, compassion, and motion picture panache, Moore has arguably set America's public discourse more than any other single artist.

Roger & Me documented the havoc wreaked on workers by corporate outsourcing and downsizing, framed through Moore's dogged pursuit of General Motors' CEO Roger Smith. Bowling for Columbine raised the issue of school shootings when mass murders by gun were still rare, instead of the regular occurrences they've now become. When the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary of 2002, Moore delivered an acceptance speech like an Old Testament prophet:

"We like nonfiction and we live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elect a fictitious President. We ... live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons.... We are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you...."

Moore followed this up with 2004's Fahrenheit 9/11, which exposed the Bush regime's lies about the Iraq War, winning the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and earning a quarter of a billion dollars as possibly the most widely seen documentary in film history. His Oscar-nominated 2007 film, Sicko, tackled America's health-care crisis, and the financial crisis received its close-up in 2009's wry Capitalism: A Love Story, which helped inspire the Occupy Wall Street cause.

Now, Moore has returned with his first documentary in six years. The droll conceit of Where to Invade Next is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff "summon" Michael to the Pentagon and deploy him to "invade" countries around the world. But instead of looting them of their natural resources, such as oil, Moore brings their best ideas--including free university education, expanded leisure time, worker representation on boards of directors, school reform, punishment of bankers for recklessly wrecking economies, prison reform, and increased female involvement in government--back to the United States for Americans to put into practice.

The son of a GM auto plant worker, Moore was born in 1954 in Flint, Michigan, where lead poisoning in the water recently caused Mayor Karen Weaver to declare a state of emergency. Moore has denounced the decisions that led to this crisis and called for the arrest of Michigan's Republican Governor, Rick Snyder.

"To poison all the children in an historic...