Michael Moore’s next film, Capitalism: A Love Story, may be his last documentary for a while. The filmmaker tells the Detroit News that he’s looking to move into fiction filmmaking.
“I have been working on two screenplays over the last couple of years,”
he tells the paper. “One’s a comedy, one’s a mystery, and I really want to do
this.”
Of course Moore has a narrative feature under his belt – unless you count Canadian Bacon as a documentary about how unfunny very talented comics can be in the wrong situation.
There will be those who will smugly say that Moore has been making fiction films all along; these people are idiots. I’m not even defending the factual content of Moore’s documentaries, simply defending the fact that documentaries can editorialize. There’s a contingent of wetbrains who think that a doc must only be footage of events captured live by the filmmaker; unfortunately for these intellectual munchkins they don’t realize that the act of editing – the prime art of all filmmaking – renders every bit of footage editorialized in and of itself. These people looking for non-biased docs will never find them as they don’t exist; the decision to include one bit of footage over another is inherently biased, and a documentary cannot feature hundreds of hours of raw footage. That’s not even getting into the fact that documentarians may not always film every interview or capture every valuable moment on film.
Thanks to Mark for the heads up.