Happy Birthday director Michael Moore

Born: Michael Francis Moore
April 23, 1954 in Flint, Michigan, USA

Best of Michael Moore quotes:

On being an altar boy, carrying the incense censer: This had all my favorite activities rolled into one: fire, smoke and emitting a strange odor.

We have got to get more documentaries in the theaters. Distribution in this country sucks.

It’s not envy, it’s war, it’s a class war that’s been perpetrated by the rich on to everyone else. The class war is one they started. The mistake they made to deal with the racial part of this is, um, their boots have been on the necks of people of color since we began. This is a nation founded on genocide and built on the backs of slaves, so alright, we started with a racial problem.

On Bowling for Columbine (2002) in 2013: I never thought I would have to, a decade later, stand here and say that that film of mine did no good. That, to me, is personally heartbreaking. Every word in it stands true to this day, which is the saddest thing.

I really didn’t realize that librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group. They are subversive. You think they are just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They’re like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn’t mess with them. You know they’ve had their budgets cut. And libraries are just the ass end of everything, right?

I have, when I’m on Bill’s [Maher] show, told him that there are far more examples historically of the death and destruction that Christians have brought to planet. From the Crusades to the Inquisition to the wiping out of Native Americans to the Holocaust.

Laughter is a way, first of all, to alleviate the pain of what you know to be the truth. And if you’re trying to be truth-tellers as filmmakers, then for God’s sake, what is wrong with giving the audience a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down? It’s hard enough for people to have to think about these issues and grapple with them, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with letting them laugh, because laughter is cathartic.

I don’t want people leaving the theatre depressed after my movies. I want them angry. Depressed is a passive emotion. Anger is active. Anger will mean that maybe five percent, ten percent of that audience will get up and say’ ‘I gotta do something. I’m going to tell others about this’ ..Or, in the case of Quentin Tarantino, who was the president of the jury at Cannes when the jury gave ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ the Palme d’Or , said to me afterwards, ‘I’ve got to tell you what your film really did for me. I’ve never voted in my life, in fact Ive never even registered to vote, but the first thing I’m going to do when I get back to L.A. is register to vote’.

The first rule of documentaries is: Don’t make a documentary – make a movie! You’ve chose this art form – the cinema, this incredible, wonderful art form – to tell your story. You didn’t have to do that. If you want to make a political speech, you can join a party – you can hold a rally. If you want to give a sermon, you can go to the seminary, you can be a preacher. If you want to give a lecture, you can be a teacher. But you’ve not chosen any of those professions. You have chosen to be filmmakers and to use the form of Cinema. So make a movie!