Michael Moore Giving Up Documentary Filmmaking?

Over the past twenty years, Michael Moore dominated the world of documentary filmmaking like no one has before. In addition to directing the highest grossing doc of all time (Fahrenheit 9/11), three more of his films rank in the top 15 for non-fiction releases at the box office. This October, his sixth major documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, will hit theatres… and apparently, it could be his last.In a recent interview with The Detroit News to promote his annual Traverse City Film Festival, Moore revealed that he has been working on a couple of screenplays and that he is feeling the need get back into fictional storytelling:

“While I’ve been making this film I’ve been thinking that maybe this will be my last documentary. Or maybe for a while… I have been working on two screenplays over the last couple of years. One’s a comedy, one’s a mystery, and I really want to do this.”

This is where all the Michael Moore haters come out and say that he’s already been peddling fiction for years. In all seriousness, many will remember that he wrote and directed the John Candy comedy Canadian Bacon back in 1995, which wasn’t all that well-received, but I could certainly seem him doing another comedy with a political edge. (The mystery sounds a bit odd though.) Perhaps Moore is sensing that his credibility as a documentary filmmaker is crumbling, or it could be that he has accomplished everything he wanted to in that realm, and he’s looking for a new challenge. Would you like to see Michael Moore take a break from documentaries for a while? What about permanently?

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