Keeping an Eye Out for Real People

CANNES, France--This is a tale of one city but two Michaels, or, to be more precise, a Michael and a Mike.

Both are filmmakers in competition at the Festival de Cannes, writer-directors who focus on the kinds of not necessarily glamorous people not ordinarily found on English-speaking screens. And both are intent as well on pushing the limits of the kinds of films they make.

Michael Moore, whose 1989 film “Roger and Me” remains one of the highest-grossing documentaries, is a nonfiction filmmaker who insists on making quite serious subjects seductive for an entertainment-seeking audience that “wants to eat popcorn, have fun and then go home and have sex afterward.”

His new film, “Bowling for Columbine,” an exploration of violence and the culture of guns in America, is the first doc to be in the Cannes competition in 46 years.

“When [artistic director] Thierry Fremaux told me that, I was like, ‘Your own rules on your Web site say, “No docs.”’ He said, ‘We are breaking tradition.’ I said, ‘You’re French, you can’t break tradition.’ He said, ‘We want to make a statement.’ I said, ‘What’s that, don’t bring guns to Cannes?’ He said, ‘These days very few American films are about something, and we wanted to be supportive of a film of substance.’”

Britain’s Mike Leigh, very much a director of substance, has been in competition here before, and he’s done exceptionally well in it. His “Naked” took the best actor award for David Thewlis in 1993, and his “Secrets & Lies” not only won best actress for Brenda Blethyn in 1996, it captured the Palme d’Or as well.

His new film, the deeply emotional, uncompromisingly honest “All or Nothing,” stars Leigh veterans Timothy Spall and Lesley Manville as a common-law husband and wife who have to handle a crisis in their lives as well as deal with their own deteriorating relationship. Like all of Leigh’s films, dating back to 1971’s “Bleak Moments,” “All or Nothing” is characterized by protagonists so insistently lifelike you can talk about them as if they were actual individuals you know.

“Even when I was growing up, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to see a film in which people are like people?’ That continues to be the motivating factor,” the director says over breakfast at the Carlton Hotel on the Croisette, the town’s central thoroughfare.

To get that level of reality, Leigh has over the years developed what he calls “this organic way of collaborating with people” in which he works intensely with the actors for months creating their characters before forming a finished script. It’s a method that’s often confused with improvisation (“I’ve come to the conclusion that substantial numbers of people are never going to understand it because they’re not paying attention,” he says) but one that is so intrinsic to Leigh himself that he says, “I don’t regard it as a technique that can be taught, I don’t believe in reducing it. The thing that makes it happen comes from something personal and intuitive. It’s not like hanging wallpaper.”

Leigh’s intensely collaborative way of working, especially in the writing stage, also has the advantage of keeping him from the kind of creative blockage that sometimes afflicts people who’ve won major awards.

“I think if as a writer I manufactured my stuff by sitting down at a typewriter, I’d suffer from the same disease,” he explains. “But in order to get one of my things to happen, I have to go through long processes, all of which involve getting out of bed early in the a.m. and making it happen for other people.

“I have to work without the option to procrastinate, without being able to say, ‘Maybe today I’ll take the morning off and then I’ll feel more creative.’ That liberates you from gazing into your navel and wondering if what you’re doing is worthy of being a Palme d’Or winner.”

The process Leigh goes through with his actors sometimes begins with what he calls “the nugget of an idea. With ‘Secrets & Lies,’ I wanted to make a film about adoption. But with others, and ‘All or Nothing’ is paramount among those, you can’t report on ideas. It’s more a collection of feelings that are quite hard to describe.”

In this case, he says, “the core of it is about love and connecting, about the way feelings become encrusted with time and pressures. I have been through a marriage breakup and been divorced, I’ve been through a lot of pain, and somewhere in that film, though in no literal way, are expressions about those sorts of things.”

While Leigh’s films invariably bring out the best in actors, he emphasizes that being in one “is a huge act of trust” for them. “People agreeing to take the part don’t know what the film is about, what they’re going to play, how big the part is. They have to have a certain frame of mind, a philosophy, a sense of camaraderie.” The results speak for themselves.

Also speaking for itself, though in a more haphazard way given its director’s self-described “reckless abandon way of doing it,” is Moore’s “Columbine.”

The film includes everything from interviews with rocker Marilyn Manson and “South Park’s” Matt Stone to security tapes of the Columbine High School shootings and a visit to a Michigan bank where Moore, who turns out to be a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., gets a free rifle for opening an account. It doesn’t catch fire, however, until Moore, midway through filming, hears about the school shooting in his home town of Flint, Mich., of a 6-year-old girl by a 6-year-old classmate.

“There was going to be no Flint in this movie, after ‘Roger and Me’ and ‘The Big One.’ It was enough in Michigan already, we weren’t going back to that well,” says Moore in an interview at the American Pavilion, an outdoor tent that’s a gathering place at the festival. “And then this happens.”

Not only was the shooting in Moore’s hometown, it was at the very school where he, his wife and Nike founder Phil Knight had contributed $20,000 for a computer lab. The Flint incident galvanized Moore in a way that galvanizes his film and led, albeit indirectly, to its climax, an interview with NRA spokesman Charlton Heston that came off, typically for Moore, almost by happenstance.

The director, who says he’s not sure why anyone still talks to him (“If Mike Wallace came to my house, I’d be running out the back door, wouldn’t you?”), says he’d tried to schedule an interview with Heston for two years through regular channels and all he got was “no, no, no, no, no.” In Los Angeles on other interviews, Moore and his crew were in a van headed down Sunset Boulevard when someone spotted a vendor of maps of the stars’ homes. A crew member said, “‘Let’s get a star map and find Heston.’ I said we had a plane to catch, I said the maps were phony and outdated, but the younger people started tormenting me, saying, ‘You’re chicken.’”

Press the Buzzer and Get the Interview

And so, “just to humor the crew,” Moore gets a map, drives to Heston’s address and (now on camera) presses the buzzer at the gate. And, to his complete surprise, “out of the box comes the voice of Moses,” with Heston agreeing to the interview that concludes “Columbine.”

Though it is tempting to see Moore as a political activist working through films, the director categorically rejects that label. “First of all, if you’re a citizen in a democracy, it’s redundant to say you’re a political activist. Democracy is not a spectator sport, and being a citizen should imply that I’m active and caring.”

Moreover, Moore sees himself primarily as a filmmaker and a filmgoer. “I’m a fan, I’ve gone to three movies a week since I was a teenager. Because there was no place in Flint to see good films, I ran my own art house for six years, did the projection and sold popcorn. We were the first place to show Truffaut, Fellini, even ‘Annie Hall.’” Because he’s a fan, Moore is grumpy about the bad rap most documentaries have.

“Documentary filmmakers have become like castor oil salesmen; ‘you should watch this doc because it’s good for you,’” he grouses. “They’ve soured the form. I love going to the movies, and I want to make movies I want to see.”

Yet because “in my personal life I’m a very shy person,” because even as he confronted Heston part of him felt “this is an old man, it’s early in the morning, he doesn’t need this kind of hassle,” Moore finds doing his kind of insistent interviewing increasingly difficult. He perseveres for a specific reason: “I’m tired of waiting around for someone else to do something.

“I was raised in an Irish Catholic household, and I believe in some of the lessons I was taught by my parents and the good sisters,” the director explains, “including that we will be judged by how we treat the least among us. If I sit back and do nothing, I’d be complicit in injustice.”

Moore’s next project is something he feels equally strongly about, something once again “my conscience doesn’t allow me to sit by about for too long.” He says it will focus on how George W. Bush “took the good will from the American people after Sept. 11 and tried to get a whole right-wing agenda through. There isn’t a month that goes by when John Ashcroft and Bush don’t shred a piece of the Constitution and our civil liberties.”

He pauses, both for breath and effect: “I’m calling it ‘Fahrenheit 911: The Temperature at Which Freedom Burns.’”