Conducting bolts from the blue

Bill Maher. Photo / Supplied

For a man who has made a career out of being a lightning rod, Bill Maher would seem to have passed some sort of test. His life as a conductor of bolts from the blue has risked becoming less metaphorical and more real - that's if you believe God does that sort of thing to those who mock his earthly bureaucracies.

Because his latest provocation is his movie entitled Religulous. It's a doco-comedy - Maher laughs when it's suggested its genre is really "interactive monologue" - about why religion is, yes, ridiculous.

Maher, 53, remains a giant of irreverent American comedy. He first made his name as a stand-up before becoming a fixture on late-night cable television with shows like Politically Incorrect and Real Time with Bill Maher.

Espousing libertarian views that extended to pro-marijuana, pro-choice and pro-death penalty, he came to wide notice and suffered a career backlash when six days after 9/11 he said terrorists were not cowards: "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."

On the phone the acerbic Maher is pretty much like you get him on screen - his every second sentence ends with an implied "you've got to be kidding me!"

He describes Religulous as his Moby Dick - a project he's been trying to haul in for a decade or more. The key, he says, was finding Larry Charles, the guerilla comedy director of Borat and Sacha Baron Cohen's forthcoming Bruno.

"It was really finding the right director - finding a comedy director because I wanted to make a funny movie, a comedy. My premise was always, 'Hey guys, this is the funniest topic in the world. If you just stand back and look at this stuff - trust me, a talking snake is very funny'."

In the film Maher, Charles and crew traipse around the sacred sites of the main monotheistic religions (including the Vatican where they are thrown out, and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem). Along the way there are Maher monologues interspersed with interviews with some colourful representatives of various faiths and various ranges of zeal - from high to extreme.

Culturally, Religulous might be seen as the middle-brow variation on pro-atheism works like Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great, or Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.

As a movie, it plays like another broad-appeal confrontational reality film, somewhere between Michael Moore and Charles' previous films. Maher appears in it as himself and risks his own neck, though he admits many of his interview subjects weren't warned he was going to be the interviewer.

"We just told them we were doing a documentary on religion so they just assumed it was pro- because nobody in American thinks you are going to say something bad about religion. You can see the look on people's faces sometimes when I walk in and they see that I am the interviewer, they are, 'Oh, shit' but by that point they either have to sit there and do the interview or get up, which I guess would make their religion look weak."

Some of Maher's interviews come with subtitles slapped on afterwards pointing out where Maher considers his subjects are lying - it's certainly not subtle. Is it fair?

"Well, what is fair in journalism? To me, if you are asking me if everything we did was totally 100 per cent fair - no, it's not. But I don't think any time a person is asking another person a question and editing it, it is totally fair. The only time it's totally fair is if it's live. Is a 60 Minutes interview totally fair? Of course not - they take a lot of footage and they shape it to write a story with a point of view."

And he's clearly proud of Religulous and the sheer scope of its target. He relishes a comparison with fellow iconoclast Michael Moore: "He pisses off 50 per cent of the people. I piss off 90 per cent in America.

"To me, this is a much more unprecedented film. This is completely unpioneered turf - to say that religion is silly and dangerous."

But it says that by going toe-to-toe with a bunch of, well, crackpots... easy targets surely.

"This idea that we only interviewed the extremists and the mental midgets and the crackpots - that is totally wrong," he says. "There really is one crackpot in the movie, Jesus Miranda - the guy in Miami who thinks he is the second coming of Jesus - and he is very funny and he is a fringe character. Everyone else in that movie represents mainstream religious thinking."

Maher and Charles edited their film from the 500 hours of footage they got from a three-month shoot, throwing in a few scenes from old religious movies for extra amusement. The film's 90-minute running time takes aim at Christianity, Judaism and Islam with a brief shot at Scientology - Maher contends that L. Ron Hubbard's celebrity-friendly creed is no wackier than any of the rest. They didn't really have time to take on the eastern religions.

Maher also takes time to reflect on his family's own religious background.

He's the son of a Catholic father and Jewish mother who stopped making the kids go to church in their teens after his journalist father disagreed with the Vatican over birth control.

"Yes, I was raised Catholic and that was stuffed into my head when I was a child and too young to do anything about it and we stopped going to church so I didn't really believe in the Jesus myth any more. But many years after that, even though I didn't think about religion very much, I didn't discount it either.

"I had a vague notion of some mythical man who lived in my head who I mostly talked to only when I was in trouble - like many people - when I was afraid, when I needed to bargain. 'Hey, God, if you get me out of this, I promise I will do this'. It wasn't until I was over 40 I really stopped doing that and thought 'Who am I bargaining with here? This is really silly'."

The movie opened in America in October, before the US presidential elections, which wasn't intentional, although he says the selection of Sarah Palin - another in a long line of "super Jesus freaky evangelical Christians that the Republican Party has seen fit to put up for high office" - was beneficial.

The Christian new American president might have acknowledged those without a religious faith in his inauguration speech but Maher says it will be a long time in America before being a professed atheist or agnostic will be considered okay.

"Every time they do a new survey they find that the number of people who are either atheist, agnostic or without any religious affiliation goes up. It will be a slow process because America is the most religious country of the western nations. But it is changing. Yes, I do think a movie like this makes a difference.

"Sometimes people ask me, 'Why are you being such a meanie, it gives them comfort - why don't you have just let them have it?'

"And I would say I think in a country where 25 per cent of the people think Jesus will return in their lifetime and 61 per cent of the people here think that religion solves all or most of their problems - that a problem like climate change is literally very affected by religion because if you think Jesus is going to come back and save the day, why sweat global warming?

"Except he is not going to come back and save the day. There are just too many people rooting for the end of the world to make me comfortable."

And wrapping up, you just have to ask ...

"No, I have not been struck by lightning."

On screen

What: Religulous
Where and when: Academy Cinema, Auckland, and Paramount, Wellington, on Thursday