Advertisement
Mike Bonanno, Andy Bichlbaum and The Yes Men Fix the World
Throughout the years, protest in this country has taken on a number of forms. Union workers have rallied outside factories with picket signs and foghorns. PETA activists have dumped gallons of paint on designers fashioned in fox furs and alligator shoes.
For moviemakers Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum, protest meant digging their claws deep into the root of the issues they care about—in essence becoming part of the problem in order to fix it. In The Yes Men Fix The World, their second documentary and first directorial effort, Bonanno and Bichlbaum pose as representatives from a number of companies and agencies that take part in the most nauseating, bottom-line-driven practices imaginable. Their voices were heard as they pulled off these spectacularly elaborate hoaxes, at times reaching audiences of 300 million people.
With each successfully executed prank, their influence has grown in ways they’ve never imagined. Now, with The Yes Men Fix The World, on DVD today, that influence is reaching a new audience; an audience perhaps entirely unaware of the atrocities happening here in America and throughout the world.
Bonanno and Bichlbaum discuss their latest documentary in this exclusive interview with MM, detailing the daring endeavors they’ve embarked upon in the name of what’s right.
Michael Walsh (MM): What led to you guys combining the concepts of a traditional documentary with fictional scenes to tell the story in The Yes Men Fix The World?
Mike Bonanno (MB): Well, we had already done a straightforward doc; the last doc we did was an observational documentary. I think for this one, we wanted to be a little weirder and a little bit more fun. We decided to just run with it, you know? We were making it a little bit more of an argument as opposed to a more observational documentary, so we thought it would be more fun to tell the story with stranger scenes in-between.
MM: Andy, what was your goal with The Yes Men Fix The World? Did you want to reach people who are in a position to make change—like lawmakers or other government officials—or are you more interested in reaching the general public? Perhaps a younger audience that can then vote in the direction that will change policy?
Andy Bichlbaum (AB): Well, you just said it really well: Both of those. Obviously our primary goal is to reach younger people and the general public; people who will maybe not only vote, but who will take to the streets and stomp their way to actual power. The main thing with our film, the thing we tried to bring home in the end, is that we really just have to make a change. You have to take power in the people. But, yeah, if lawmakers see it, that’s fantastic. We have tried to set up a congressional hill screening, which we’re still looking into.
MM: When making a documentary, it’s obviously difficult to predict how everything is going to unfold since there’s no script. Mike, in instances like when you posed as Halliburton executives and were advertising the survival bubble, did you find it difficult to steer the story in the direction you intended when virtually no one opposed your ideas or your product? Some people were even intrigued by it. Was that difficult?
MB: Yeah, I think it was pretty hard to predict which way the story would go from scene to scene. Sometimes, the next thing that we would do was, we would think of what we’d done last time and try to figure out how it connected. The thing is, after a while we did figure out that [corporate] audiences rarely would react to anything from someone in power—react in a negative way. So that became a bit predictable, and so it becomes even more fun when we’re doing something more extreme like with the survival ball, and we kind of knew that nobody was going to say anything to rock the boat. So we thought making it sillier and even more outrageous would work, and it did.
MM: It seemed like there was no limit as to what you could do and still not get an angry reaction from people.
MB: Absolutely.
MM: And you guys sort of proved that to a point.
AB: Yeah, that’s definitely true. It’s just not in our nature to question what’s in front of us. And it shouldn’t necessarily be, either. It’s kind of in the human capacity to enjoy a book or play, managing to just forget it’s all fake. The trouble is that we should believe what we’re presented with. If you read something in the paper, you should be able to trust it. If you go to a conference, you should believe the person who’s there, but if the person starts saying really horrific things, or if you start reading the paper and it’s full of contradictions and it’s not possible, then it’s really time to break out of that and say “Wait a second, I believe [what they’re saying], but it’s wrong.” And that’s what’s shocking—that people believed that we were from Halliburton, but when Halliburton starts saying something reprehensible, they should say “Wait, I don’t like Halliburton anymore.”
MM: Andy, were there any reactions that surprised you more than others? Because at one point you’re facing a journalist who’s questioning you very hard, and at other times people were just accepting your ideas—like with the disaster bubble, for example.
AB: Well, at this point it’s always more surprising when people do come after us. We’ve been doing this for a number of years, and it’s pretty rare when people take issue. In New Orleans, when that journalist came after us like a rabid bull, it was exciting and a lot of fun. He was just doing his job.
MM: You mention in the film that hotels like the Ritz-Carlton were threatening you with legal action if you ever decided to use their names in the film. You did so anyway. Did they or any other company actually follow up on those threats?
1 of 2 |
SHARE THIS STORY |
TAGS |
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Del.icio.us
Reddit
YahooAdvertisement
COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by Земельные участки on 4/04/10 at 7:25 am
Andy Bichlbaum protest himself
posted 05.25.12
posted 05.22.12
posted 05.15.12
SITE DELIVERY OPTIONS
