Filmmaker Michael Moore 'gets lots of Republican hugs'

Michael Moore

TRAVERSE CITY, Michigan - Michael Moore - gadfly filmmaker, liberal activist and political lightning rod - says he finds himself being hugged by a lot of Republicans these days.

On the streets of Traverse City, where Moore is working on last-minute preparations for a bigger-and-better sequel to the film festival he launched last year in his home state, the Oscar-winning director says he is approached all the time by conservatives ready to make peace.

"If you were to hang out with me here it won't be five or 10 minutes before you see a Republican hug me. That is almost as entertaining as some of the films," Moore said in an interview.

Moore has not budged from the central claim of his 2004 documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" - that the Bush administration misled the American public about the reasons for war in Iraq - but he says that more people have come around to his view.

"That's the shift that I'm seeing in the past year or so in the country, and as it relates to me," he said.

Some in solidly Republican northern Michigan and elsewhere now believe that they made a "colossal mistake" in initially supporting the war in Iraq, Moore said, and they have let him know it in chance encounters on the streets of Traverse City, a resort town where he has relocated from New York.

Used to traveling with security and encountering a barrage of hostility, Moore said he finds people now more accepting, even to the point Republicans are spontaneously hugging him.

"Look up the definition of liberal. We hug trees. We hug each other. We hug people of the same sex and want to marry each other," Moore said. "It's the other side that we need to get to hold their arms out a little bit and coochey-coo."

The success of the second annual Traverse City Film Festival, which runs from Monday to Sunday, has also won over some of Moore's political foes - or at least sidelined them.

This year's slate features 68 films selected by Moore. Festival organizers expect over 75,000 to attend. That would mark a 50-per cent gain over the inaugural event, which drew some of the controversy that has become the 52-year-old director's calling card.

In 2005, critics attempted to upstage the Traverse City film festival with a parallel event nearby intended to hammer the message that Moore was out of touch with the mainstream. Moore said the effort failed to draw crowds and fizzled.

At work on 'Sicko'

Moore says he intends the festival to be "nonpartisan," even as it takes on charged topics with films like "The Road to Guantanamo." Moore calls that film about three British men jailed without charges in the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a look at "a disgraceful moment in our history we're still living through."

Moore is mostly done shooting his own film "Sicko." The movie examines America's health care system and Moore describes it as "a comedy about 45 million people with no health care in the richest country on earth." The film is due out in 2007.

For now, he seems pleased with the outbreak of relative goodwill toward him after a depressing period when he thought he might not be able to work again in Hollywood.

Moore was booed and escorted from the Kodak Theater by security when he used his 2003 Oscar acceptance speech for documentary "Bowling for Columbine" to lash out at President George W. Bush.

"I remember going back to my hotel room that night, where they had all the pundits on post-Oscar and they were all like, 'That's the end of Michael Moore. That's the last we'll see of him.' By the end of the night, I believed it," he said.

"I thought, No one is going to want to work with me in this town. I just ruined their big party.' We're all supposed to ignore that the war is going on and just have a party. Well, now here we three years later and it's not just me. It's a few other people saying that we weren't told the truth."

- REUTERS