When Michael Met Sacha
What, you may or may not find yourselves wondering, could agitprop documentary director Michael Moore possibly have in common with guerrilla-comedy king Sacha Baron Cohen? Quite a bit, it just so happens, as a chance encounter at last year's Toronto International Film Festival led to a mutual gush-a-thon between the two mischief-making filmmakers:
Cohen told Moore he had drawn inspiration from the filmmaker's documentaries, in which Moore doggedly pursues corporate and political bosses and puts himself into uncomfortable situations.
"I said to him, `But yeah, I've never done anything like wrestle naked with another guy on the floor of an insurance-brokers or mortgage-brokers convention," Moore told The Associated Press. "So after I saw `Borat,' if he says I was an inspiration for those things, I now have to up the ante for him. So we sailed into the mined waters of Guantanamo Bay with sick 9/11 workers and a bullhorn."
Not only did Cohen inspire Moore to attempt larger-scale and ballsier stunts than ever before, but his faux-Kazakh counterpart's misadventures also provided some highly effective field tactics, ultimately resulting in securing Moore's ill 9/11 workers the medical attention they so desperately needed after the Sicko director won a nude wrestling match with a wiry guard by suffocating him with his anus.