Paul Farren talks to Mark Achbar, producer and co-director of The Corporation.

Paul: What made you want to make a documentary on Corporations?

Mark: I wanted to make a film about globalization in the mid 1990s, and in 1997 I met Joel Bakan; he is a law professor, author, and a great scholar from Oxford and Harvard. He was a fan of Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, a film that I co-directed. His brilliance struck me very quickly in a conversation that we had, and we decided to collaborate. So he would write content and I tried to come with visual treatments for that.

The documentary uses a mix of archival footage and interviews from people on both sides of the fence. At what stage did you decide on the form and structure of the documentary?

I don't know. We've kind of let form follow the function in a way, you know. I think both Jennifer Abbott (editor & co-director) and I we've got a great love of that area of archival footage. As it turned out a good deal of it is available for free at archive.org, a fantastic site where you can download 1,600 public domain films for free . They're in MPEG 2-MPEG 4 quality, and all brought to you by the fabulous REC Pralenger to whom all independent filmmakers are in great debt for making these resources public. We used those, but we still ended up paying for a lot of archival footage. There was a kind of conceptual structure set down on paper and then what really came in the door on tape. I was out in the field doing interviews in Seattle and in Quebec; and Jennifer was in this idyllic island, with her cutting room overlooking her organic garden and her two adopted pigs - she is a big animal right's activist. So she was out of that space, she was were she could retain her sense of humour, while I was out in the field getting attacked and beaten (laughs). We both went through transcripts and had a lot to select from. There were 800 pages of transcripts, then seventy of the interviews boiled down to forty for the film.

And forty very interesting interviews.

Yes, interesting, really interesting. A good mix, a very high degree of candour, I think we managed to get that.

One that stands out for me was the CEO Ray Anderson with his born again attitude, he talked like an evangelist minister when he called for changes in the corporate attitude, but Is he sincere? Does he really have the power to do things?

Well, you know, he runs a billion dollar corporation that supplies a lot of carpets to a lot of companies. I just bought some for my basement suite at home, I figure I didn't have too much choice [laugh]

He sold you a carpet?

He sold me a carpet, man. It's like... yeah, it's interesting [laughs].

Another stand out interviewee was the Wall Street broker, talking about September 11th and how the first thought in his head was that gold was going to skyrocket. He tells it so matter of fact and jolly. Where'd you get him?

He is a friend, he's terrific, he's a great guy. He lives in New Zealand. I went to New Zealand for an opening there, he came to the screening and he did the Q&A. He talks like it is, that's why he is in the film. It's that really untarnished, honesty ... that that's the kind of person we wanted in the film, that just tell it like it is from the inside. You can get a bunch of leftist critics to tell you that corporations are taking over the world, that you have no power. When you get the CEO of Goodyear tyres telling you that, it gives that fact a credibility in the minds of people who otherwise just take issue with the source, with the person delivering the message. That's what you need. If you wanna get people like that in your film, you need somebody who can talk to the PR person, or talk to their secretary or talk to that person in such a way that if they feel that if they are not in this film, they are missing out on an opportunity. You'd rather have people talking about you than not talking about you, and you'd rather be putting forward your point of view instead of having somebody speaking about you - especially if they're gonna say something that you don't like. They're not running around with guilty conscious, these guys, they are confident about what they're doing, they're proud of their work, they're proud of their companies, and proud of their products, and they're happy to talk about then. And I think it was also an opportunity for them to be seen as smart, philosophical platform people. A lot of the times these guys get called for interviews likke 'what was your last quarter earnings per chair... blah blah blah'. They're probably sick of that stuff.

Did you know you have a good idea of how the material was going to turn out when you started work?

Pretty well. We had an outline, for sure. There was like the nature of the institution; a sort of takeover of every aspect of our lives; the impact on democracy - there were points we wanted to make and subject areas that we just wanted to explore. And once we laid it out on a big spreadsheet we had all the stories on one site, and we had all the potential stories, stories that we quit, stories that we researched, they were all in a column. So it was like: 'What stories are we gonna tell? We've got a lot of stories that we could tell to make various points...'

Did you worry about going over old ground with some of the stories you were going to use? Stuff that had been heard before?

Yes, sure, we felt that way about sweatshops. You feel that people think they know about it - people feel we've been there we did that and that, but it's not like the problem is fixed - the problem is not fixed. The world is so full of corporate stories, everyday you open the paper you can find another twenty stories. So it becomes who can you get access to, who will talk to you, and is the story still going to be alive by the time you get the money to make the thing. So it's just this kind of complicated confluence of events, money and access. Complicated. And that's partly why we sat down and cut about 450 hours material. Jennifer (editor) is very disciplined about working in text first, cutting and pasting in text and even cutting on screen just interview material and not illustrating until much later in the process.

The CEOs that you interviewed - I'm sure you let them knew exactly what you were about, how many did you approach before finding people who would talk?

I don't know how many exactly. I mean more said no than said yes. Because we tried for Bill Gates, and you try to all these superstar big names, and a few said yes - most said no.

The interviewees look straight to camera, so in effect they are addressing the audience in a direct way as they tell their 'truths'. How did you achieve this?

They were actually talking to a mirror - they are looking at a reflection of me, the camera is looking through the mirror at them, and so if I get my eyes line up just right they're looking just at the part of the lens. That means that they can look straight into the lens, which is hard for anybody to do for any period of time, and these interviews are on average an hour long.

What were the CEOs' responses after seeing It?

Sir Moody-Stuart (CEO for Shell Oil) wrote a letter to The Economist, because The Economist did a quite good review of the film, it said 'people on both sides of the globalisation debate should see this film'. Quite complimentary - it was really good. Sir Moody-Stuart wrote a letter the next week and took exception with the psychopath diagnosis. Well, he took exception because he said it wasn't fair to take symptoms from several different corporations, and make one diagnosis. It's an arguable point, but the first thing he said was that we were very polite and respectful interviewers. They complimented us twice anyway.

Michael Moore was another interesting addition. What made you decide to use him?

Well, he is a very accomplished anti-corporate activist. When you look back at TV Nation, and you look back at The Awful Truth, and Roger & Me and you look at The Big One. He is dealing with very similar subject matter and problems in his unique way, and he's also a pretty good political analyst. He's not explicit about it. You know, it's interesting. This film is quite unusual with him, it's a different tone from his usual. He was very good, he didn't have much time and he really delivered. It's like 37 or 38 minutes that he gave us. He was telepathic in understanding what we were doing, and what we needed.

Documentaries like yours and Moore's, are getting an increased exposure in the multiplexes, so the audiences are definitely going. Do you worry they are being seen and forgotten as quickly as any other film, or can documentaries like these actually affect change?

Four thousand people a day go into our website. That's a lot of traffic, that's a lot of people wanting to find out more, you know, they don't do that just for the hell of it, they go there for a reason. It's sad in a way that these films are necessary in the first place, but it's encouraging that people are going to see them [laugh]. When you see the kind of numbers that are going to see Michael Moore's films... the percentage of Americans that said that they have watched that film, or that they're going to when it comes out on DVD, that's a spectacular number! And the fact that it's playing in multiplexes and in little towns which I've never heard of, helping the possibility of other documentaries, and political documentaries, in a way proves to theatre owners that 'yes, I can play a documentary here, and people will pay and I will make money'. And it opens the possibility that another political documentary can take that space, you know.

Thanks for your time Mark any final words?

Go to the website. [laugh] The final word is that we don't have a multimillion dollar ad campaign, and the way films like this will survive is because you - the reader of this article - take two minutes and go to www.thecorporation.tv and sign up to help us in some way. And even if that's only to pass on an email that we can give you an update, or when the DVD is gonna being released, or tell you when the film is playing or something that you can pass on to perhaps a more conservative friend. I think that is the challenge, to support a film like this to keep it alive in theatres, and also to try to collectively enter some kind of democratic discussion about what we're gonna do about this problem. That's the challenge, I think.

So you are cautiously optimistic

I think people do care. But we are so distracted with other things or by the media that we need reminding that we care. I think that this film touches those cores somehow, and reminds people that they care. I know that it does that for me.