AMY GOODMAN: We’re broadcasting from Park City, Utah, home of the Sundance Film Festival, the nation’s largest festival for independent cinema. We’re broadcasting from its headquarters.

 

Today we speak with one of the most famous independent filmmakers in the world, Michael Moore. For the past twenty years, Michael has been one of the most politically active, provocative and successful documentary filmmakers in the business. His films include Roger and me; Fahrenheit 9/11; Bowling for Columbine, for which he won the Academy Award; and his latest, Capitalism: A Love Story.

 

Michael Moore was in Park City this week to watch some of this year’s selections for the Sundance Film Festival. He’s also choosing some for his own, the Traverse City Film Festival in Michigan, where he now lives.

 

I had a chance to sit down with Michael Moore just after a film screening, just before he headed back to his hometown in Michigan. I began by asking him about the situation in Haiti.

 

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, I mean, the most wonderful thing about the—when you say “the US response” is that the individual Americans have immediately rallied, immediately that day, to wanting to help, whether it was texting a donation to the Red Cross or volunteering to go down there. People immediately began collecting.

 

I was in Miami when the earthquake happened, and so I saw a lot of it there. I mean, just the Haitian community and others in South Florida. There was actually—there was a doctor in Fort Lauderdale who owned his own private plane and just decided not to wait for the government to give him any clearance. He just went to the airport, literally hopped in his plane, went there, gathered as many injured as he could, put them in his plane—this was like with no permission or anything—and brought fifteen or so people back to the Fort Lauderdale hospital. I mean, that was—I thought, God, you know, why don’t we see more of that?

 

But the response from the—our government

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