Director Richard Linklater Taking on the American Meat Industry with Movie Based On Book - Eric Schlosser's 2001 Bestselling Exposé, Fast Food Nation

This will be an incredible film. For those who haven’t read Fast Food Nation, you better do it soon. It’s a real life look at our fast food culture, from slaughterhouses to the board rooms of the giant fast food chains. The film will be based on the book though, as you’ll read, in order not to get sued by the corporations they are talking about, they had to not use the corporate names in the film. Good to see that this kind of film can get mainstream.

Article:

'I've never been in the firing line like this before'

Director Richard Linklater is known for his gentle, Gen-X movies. Now he's taking on the American meat industry with Fast Food Nation. He talks exclusively to Xan Brooks

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/
interviewpages/0,,1780445,00.html

Monday May 22, 2006
The Guardian

'It's like it's a felony to say something bad' ... Richard Linklater (left) with Eric Schlosser. Photograph: Laurent Emmanuel/AP


Richard Linklater's film Fast Food Nation ends on the killing floor, as cattle march placidly up a ramp to be slaughtered. We see them shot and shackled, sliced and diced. Grey loops of intestine come sweeping down the conveyor belt like some demented version of The Generation Game. Inside the cinema at Cannes, the audience groaned and covered their eyes.

Fast Food Nation is Linklater's filleted, fictionalised take on Eric Schlosser's 2001 bestselling exposé. The director worked with Schlosser on the script and then shot it at speed, with A-list actors (Bruce Willis, Greg Kinnear) camped out in a motel, and a Mexican slaughterhouse doubling for the abattoirs of Colorado. An outside bet for the Palme d'Or, the film marks the latest twist in a freewheeling career that has carried Linklater from the fringes of Austin, Texas to mainstream Hollywood and back again.

We are hiding out in the dark corner of a hotel bar. Linklater and Schlosser flew into Cannes a few hours earlier and are eager to hear how the press screening went. What did the audience make of that final scene? Did anyone run out screaming? The director is keyed up, excited about the prospects of a movie that dares lock horns with the giants of America's cheap meat industry. "I've never had a film that's been in the firing line like this before," he confesses. "I mean, I've made films that people have liked or disliked, but never anything like this. It's kind of fun, actually."

Schlosser strikes a more cautious note. "You say that now," he says gloomily. "Wait and see how you feel when the movie comes out." At home the author has been targeted by a website bankrolled by the food lobbies, and routinely finds his book readings disrupted by protesters. "Rightwing nuts," Linklater calls them.

It remains to be seen whether the film of Fast Food Nation will ruffle as many feathers as the book did. Undeniably, it does a fine job of converting Schlosser's source material into a multi-strand drama in the style of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, covering all aspects of food production, from the impoverished migrants who work the packing plants to the grinning executives in their sun-drenched boardroom. But the film is essentially a drama, not a documentary. Linklater suggests that this makes the message easier to swallow, arguing that an audience will respond better to a human story than a thicket of facts and figures. "Characters take you beyond the politics. You can watch a movie and like it without necessarily agreeing with what the director is saying." Schlosser concurs: "This is a fictional film, but the plot elements are all taken from real life," he says. "All of this really happened at one stage or another."

Even so, some major changes have been made. The star of Schlosser's book is McDonald's, but in the film the corporation has been relegated to the role of background artist, a name to be dropped in business meetings. Instead, the action focuses on a fictional fast-food chain called Mickey's, which we are led to believe is a little bit like McDonald's, except (of course) for the fact that it exploits its workforce and specialises in hamburgers that contain a high "faecal content".

Linklater and Schlosser insist that there is no way they could have found a bigger role for McDonald's. The fact that the brand crops up at all, they explain, is only down to their own perseverance. "It's one of the most frustrating things about making a film," says Linklater. "Out in the real world there is no avoiding these companies; they're shoving themselves down your throat every waking second. Then suddenly you make a film and you can't even put them in the background, or you could get sued."

If the film is at all critical, the situation is harder. "These days we can be sued for disparaging an industry. It's like it's a felony to say something bad." Linklater shakes his head. "I think they should make it a felony to criticise a film product. Particularly my film product. It's anti-American. I'd like to see people get sued if they wrote a bad review of my movie. If you can't say something nice you shouldn't say anything at all."

"We're joking about this, but it's true," says Schlosser. "You can't criticise these big corporations. If you do you're an anarchist, socialist, whatever."

I suspect, though, that Linklater has always relished his role as an anarchist-socialist-whatever. This is the man who name-tagged a generation with his 1990 breakthrough Slacker and who has since steered a wild, iconoclastic course through American cinema. His films are airy, loquacious, full of warmth and wit. One thinks of those star-crossed chatterboxes, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise, or the criss-crossing interactions of the teenage revellers from Dazed and Confused. "My plan B has always been to make a film about people who talk a lot," Linklater explains.

Now, at the age of 44, he is able to mix mainstream crowd-pleasers such as School of Rock with more ambitious projects. Such is his rate of productivity that he has two films showing at Cannes this year: A Scanner Darkly, his Philip K Dick adaptation, screens later this week.

Inevitably, our conversation circles back to the killing floor. Linklater tells me how Mexican abattoirs are much the same as American ones, except cleaner; how the workers in the US are all Mexican anyway - the only thing they had to change was the language on the signs. But there is something preying on his mind. With its twitching carcasses and yellow mounds of fat, the last scene of Fast Food Nation appears expressly designed to put the viewer off meat for life. The problem is that for Linklater, a vegetarian since his 20s, it nearly had the reverse effect.

"It was the craziest situation," he says. "So many of the crew came out saying, 'I will never eat meat again.' But maybe it was all the smells. The warm blood. I swear to God it must have activated some long-dormant enzymes in my stomach, because I came out smelling a medium-rare steak, straight off the grill."

He pauses to chew metaphorically over the implications. "And wouldn't that have been the ultimate failure of this film? If it turned me into a meat eater." By this point he is looking alarmed. "I wouldn't have eaten the steak," he insists, as much to himself as to me. "But for a second there I almost could have."