Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are two members of The Yes Men, a small group of international anti-corporate prankster-style political activists. Their actions include setting up websites imitating the likes of George Bush's website whereby they make what appear to be minor interventions but which are in fact fundamental criticisms. At the beginning of the documentary they discuss how they set up another spoof website modelled on that of the World Trade Organisation. This results in invitations to present lectures and seminars all over the world as representatives of the very organisation they set out to critique. They gleefully rise to the challenge and, with their small network of Yes Men, organise outrageous lectures designed to poke fun, criticise and also jumpstart the audience into having some sort of individual responsibility in their involvement in the unquestioned corporate dynamic of institutional corruption. Their particular style of activism is also designed to draw attention from journalists, so that issues which would lie dormant and unexposed eventually reach an audience.

Even when they present the most outlandish and incredible lectures they find that they are confronted with audience apathy. At The International Trade Law Conference in Salzburg their lecture featured a 'Leisure Suit' of skin-tight gold lamé with a giant protruding phallus and 'posterior implants' as a possible solution to the difficulties of employer/employee relationships and barely an eyebrow is raised. Their mission to infiltrate and expose the internal mechanisms of global free trade through humour, satire, and sheer nerve proved harder than they initially thought.

On the 3rd December 2004, the 20th anniversary of the chemical disaster in Bhopal, The Yes Men released a hoax statement on behalf of Dow chemicals claiming full responsibility for the leakage of tons of lethal gases which killed 7,000 people within days, 15,000 within years, and which left hundreds of thousands suffering from chronic illnesses in and around Bhopal in India. The hoax statement issued by a Mr "Jude Finisterra" also included a promise to compensate the victims of the disaster to the tune of billions of dollars. A somewhat puzzled British media interpreted the hoax as a cruel exercise by raising the false hopes of the victims in Bhopal. However, without this latest prank, according to The Yes Men, the 20th Anniversary of the DOW chemical disaster in Bhopal would have gone largely unnoticed in the North American press.

Carol: Why are you called The Yes Men?

You know how a funhouse mirror exaggerates your most hideous features? We do that kind of exaggeration operation, but with ideas. We agree with people – turning up the volume on their ideas as we talk, until they can see their ideas distorted in our funhouse mirror. Or that's what we try to do, anyhow – but as it turns out the image always seems to look normal to them.

Who and what inspired The Yes Men?

Both the methods and the goals of The Yes Men are as hoarily ancient as, say, lemonade. Criticizing those in power with a smile and a middle finger happens in literature from Aristophanes to Shakespeare, in mythologies from the banks of the Volga to those of the Mississippi, in movements from the Diggers to the Situationists.

Who and what inspires your targets – say, the lawyers in Salzburg? Surely its not greed that makes them agree with such lunacy.

Right, it's mostly faith. The power of faith to transcend the most obvious logic is a well-established phenomenon.

When the crusaders discovered themselves in pitched battle against the Christians they had travelled thousands of miles to save, they refused to amend their theory that these Christians needed their help. Faith!

Faith, likewise, spurred thirty-nine web developers to don Nikes and swallow poison, on the theory – not backed by solid evidence – they'd shortly meet up on the Hale-Bopp Comet. (The "Heaven's Gate" suicide was remarkable among mass suicide for its interference with observational astronomy.) And when Appalachian snake handlers insist on dancing with poisonous critters, despite not-so-rare deaths and lost limbs, it is from faith in the theory that God is protecting them. Similarly our audience of lawyers in Salzburg had a theory – that the free market could bring happiness to the world at large – and they had the deepest possible faith in it. We had imagined that if we pushed our proposal into the outer limits of ugliness we could horrify our audience into objecting.

But the nature of their faith was such that so long as our proposals derived from the one true theory, there was no way they would ever see anything wrong with them.

When did you decide that you wanted to film what you were doing? Were you approached?

We approached the filmmakers in 2001 after the first time we presented to the WTO at The International Trade Law Conference in Saltzberg. We realised that what we were doing could be a movie, because we had gone with our own little video camera and made a tape thinking that we were just going to witness ourselves being arrested. But it turned out that no one noticed the crazy things we were saying, so it was much more interesting just to do a hit and run kind of prank. That was when we invited Sarah Price and Dan Ollman to come with us to the next thing.

How much control did you have in the making of the film, and what was your relationship like with the filmmakers?

Well we didn't have any real control in structuring the film, and the filmmakers have a very sort of direct cinema approach to making the film, so it actually happens chronologically as it did happen, and they made a lot of choices about what to include and what not to include. But they have a fairly straightforward approach to it. They showed us things to ask us what we thought, but they didn't always do what we wanted them to do. They were making it on their own and it was best that way for us, because we would have had to spend all our time making a film instead of actually making the projects.

And how do you feel about how you are represented in the film and the filmmaking, editorial and aesthetic decisions?

Well how we are represented is great, because we are represented as human and bumbling a little. The idea to communicate that anyone can do this sort of thing and use the techniques that we use to build stories in the media which communicate these things to a lot of people is great, and we intend to show that this is something that a lot of people can do and that we don't have any special talent for it… We have a certain talent but at the same time anyone who desired to do it could do it.

And how did that change the events that you were co-ordinating? Did it have an effect on the way you performed, or the ideas that you came up with?

No. I mean it changed things in that they had to make up a story about why they were filming us, but no it didn't change what we did.

And no one then suspected what you were doing because you had cameras following you?

No. People expect the important people to have cameras following them, so it didn't really affect them or make them suspicious at all. It added to the legitimacy.

By making it into a movie and by making your polemic a spectacle do you think that it in some way de-politicises what you are doing?

How do you mean exactly? How would that work?

Perhaps what becomes more important is the joke rather than what you are trying to achieve, or the coverage becomes more important rather than the actual event.

Well the actual event is not very important, because the people who are there are going to believe what they are going to believe and we are not going to change their minds. I don't know how that actually makes it less political. Obviously what we do is less powerful in a direct political way than say being somebody who has amassed a lot of legal experience, has gone to Law School, has built a career, and is actually working through the halls of power to make change and make it more difficult for corporations to perpetrate abuses or something like that. What we do is nothing compared to that in a way. It just serves as a kind of supporting function to that sort of work. It is more about getting information out there.

Would you ever consider working on that level?

Sure, if we had the talent to do that. We are not legal experts so we can't do that, and I don't know if we would be good at doing straight up politics and becoming MPs or anything like that.

How do you think things will change through what you do? Awareness?

Yes, making people aware of the things that we can do – to build awareness.

Do you think that what you are doing is making a difference?

We guesstimate that it is somehow, somewhere. And we're having a lot of fun with it anyhow; so even if not, it's not like we're bigger fools than we obviously are. And either way, it's better than sitting on our asses waiting for the world to change on its own.

There are a lot of Yes Men but the film didn't really put your activities into context. There was one guy mentioned, a French guy…?

Italian… Snafu. Yeah. Well I mean he is doing all kinds of different things and not exactly turning them into movies or even putting them on the website. And then there are other people who are doing other kinds of work that is integral to what we are doing, and we like to think that we bring attention to what they are doing like Barry Coates at The World Development Movement. It is very important to what we are doing and yeah there are many many others.

How do you come up with ideas? Is there a hierarchy within your group and one person comes up with all the ideas or how does it work?

Yeah, I have all the ideas.

I was thinking of it in relation to the fact that you do a lot of touring, there is a lot of research and a lot of organisation. It is a bit like a band and I was wondering if there are any difficulties in communication between people in the group? With those sorts of things there are bound to be structures that evolve.

I mean it has been a very loose collaboration. We don't have any rules, and that is part of the reason why it is made of really small cells if you will. I mean mostly it is the two of us working on specific projects, and then other people join us for things. Like we have one guy who does a lot of press release writing because he is just super-good at that and willing to help out and make sure we don't do something stupid. There is another guy Patrick, who you see in the movie, who does the animations, and we send him an idea and then he does something completely different and we use that because it is always better than whatever we thought – it is just weirder than we could possibly imagine ourselves. And so there are different ways in which we collaborate with different people too. We also work with different groups that are also two or three people that expand or contract depending on what we are doing.

How do you feel about your most recent performance in relation to the anniversary of the Bhopal disaster?

Okay. I mean we feel that we did the job.

What was the job?

The job was to get it into the media – an awareness thing. To get it into the US media because it was already very heavily in the British media, but in the US that anniversary passes without any notice whatsoever. And even very savvy journalists that we have talked to said that they hadn't known that this was the 20th anniversary until they saw what we did, and there were dozens of articles and probably news pieces of all sorts on TV and radio that happened because of what we did in bringing DOW and Bhopal to the attention of the press. In so far that that was our goal to begin with that was very successful. And we made some enemies and pissed off some people, and made ourselves look kinda not as nice as we did before, what with the false hopes that may or may not have happened to the degree that they were reported. I mean we are still trying to track down people whose false hopes were reported. It's not certain that that is entirely accurate – maybe but we just don't know. But certainly, any false hopes that did happen are terribly unfortunate.

I think in a way through your actions you uncover things that might not necessarily be uncovered in the press; but in relation to this disaster we in Britain couldn't understand the point of the exercise, as it had been uncovered here in the mainstream press.

Here it just didn't make any sense at all. It is interesting in that way. Here the BBC coverage of Bhopal is amazing, and there is tons of stuff on it and dramatised specials – I saw a lot of it, I was here. But there was virtually nothing in the United States. CNN was the only station that was running an anniversary piece at all.

Here it was interpreted as a snub against the media.

At the expense of the victims, right?

Yes.

Well I mean, neither the victims nor the BBC were remotely the target, the target was DOW and their reputation. And both were sort of accidental. The BBC seemed to be the only major network that was covering it. And the victims – we didn't expect the retraction to take two hours to happen. DOW didn't react for a good long time, and they weren't available for a good long time. I mean the HQ of DOW is in midland Michigan and it was actually 3am or 4am there at the time. That could have been part of it – they were asleep.

And how does that make you assess what you do now?

It worked. But for the whole weekend we were saying 'Oh shit, what have we done, did we do it wrong', etc. But finally when the dust began to settle and we figured out what had happened and how it had been reported here and there and evaluated the whole thing we realised that it had been totally successful. I mean the goal of it was never to make ourselves look good. The goal was to bring DOW to the table and make them acknowledge that they weren't going to help the victims of Bhopal, and to do it in an arena in the United States media where they have their offices and where it will bring attention to the issue and it worked. The coverage in the US was pretty positive, and it didn't focus on the false hopes so much. I think part of it is that a lot of journalists in the US would love to write about Bhopal, but because of the way the US media is structured they just can't do that and it is just a non-issue there.

www.theyesmen.org