Michael Francis Moore is an American documentary filmmaker and author, born in Flint, Michigan 1954. He studied journalism at the University of Michigan-Flint. He began his journalistic career writing for the school newspaper "The Michigan Times", but dropped out of college and worked a short time as the editor for "Mother Jones".After 4 months at "Mother Jones" Moore was fired. According to Matt Labash, The Weekly Standard, it was because he refused to print an article by Paul Berman that was critical of the Sandinista human rights record in Nicaragua. Moore didn't want to run the article because he believed it to be inaccurate. "The article was flatly wrong and the worst kind of patronising bullshit. You would scarcely know from it that the U.S had been at war with Nicaragua for the last five years. Though Moore believes the reason was because of the publisher's refusal to allow him to cover a story on the GM plant closings in his hometown of Flint, Michigan.
Moore then turned to filmmaking. His first film was "Roger & Me" (1989), a feature-length documentary about the closure of General Motors' plant in Flint, Michigan, which resulted in the loss of 30 000 jobs. The same case that he believed he was fired for at "Mother Jones". To get the budget for the documentary Moore ran bingo games in the neighbourhood. The success of the film made him one of Americas best known and most controversial documentary filmmakers.
Moore has later on produced a lot of documentary films and TV series, criticising topics such as globalisation, large corporations, assault weapon ownership, U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the Iraq War, the American health care system and capitalism. His first hit was "Bowling for Columbine" (2002) where he investigated the gun policy in America and showed the bad points of the right to bear arms. The documentary earned him an Oscar and boosted his reputation as a documentary filmmaker. In 2004 he made an ever bigger hit "Fahrenheit" 9/11 where he made fun of George W. Bush. This documentary is the highest grossing documentary of all time.
As well as making documentaries Moore has also written and starred in the TV show "TV Nation", a satirical news magazine television series, and "The Awful Truth", a satirical show. As well as the TV Shows Moore has written and co-written 8 non-fictional books, e.g "Stupid White Men" (2001) and "Dude, Where's My Country?" (2003), mostly on similar subjects to his documentaries.Moore is well known for having the guts to give his opinion in public, and for that he's respected by many and has earned the number 1 spot on IMDB's list of The Top 10 greatest Documentary Directors of All Time. He was also named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine in 2005.
Moore both writes and directs most of his documentaries as well as taking the role of the "reporter". He's a very unlikely political figure with his glasses, cap and baggy jeans. His style seems to be hurling himself into major issues with wit and humour, hoping his energy capture public opinion. He believes strongly in the common man's stand against the State.
In his documentaries, there's a lot of handheld footage and you can sometimes see over exposed, extremely shaky images in the film. That underlines the actuality and the fact that it's not staged. That's most likely the only shot they got and therefore they're using it. I like how truthful he is in his documentaries. He asks the questions he wants to be answered no matter what they are and states his opinion, not caring what other people think. For that, I find him very inspiring both as a journalist and documentary filmmaker.
When planning our pitch for the documentary we had to decide on which style we wanted to use and how we'd like to present it. We sat down as a group and looked at BBC 3 documentaries to see what style they usually went for. We looked at different documentaries and realised that they often go for expository documentaries where the aim is to inform or to show and tell a story, often by using "voice of God" - having a narration talking over the picture. What we also saw was that they often use a presenter to go on a journey to investigate a certain topic.
We liked the idea of having a presenter to investigate whether our generation are numb or not instead of just-just having a narrator. The style we ended up wanting to go for is very Michael Moore/ Louis Theroux like in the sense that he goes right into the investigation and takes us on a journey to investigate. The presenter won't be pretending to be any expert, he'll just be going on a journey like a normal person with the knowledge that he already has, but having the guts to ask the questions that he wants to be answered and doing his research as he goes.
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