Michael Moore is unarmed and extremely dangerous.

Watch Michael Moore interview: normal

Michael Moore is everywhere at the moment. “Yeah. It’s a bit much,” he told Collective at a screening of Bowling For Columbine last Monday. “I guess it sorta kills my idea of having a one-man ice show.”

So how does he think British audiences will react to his withering critique of America’s gun laws. “I think they'll look at it and go, ‘What can we do to not be like them?’ Americans think that Europeans like the movie because you like to laugh at us. But I think it goes a little bit deeper than that. You’re only laughing at us because if you stopped and looked at yourselves you’d start to cry.”

Moore calls the film “my statement about where I see my country at the turn of century”. And it’s not pretty. “It’s a look at our desire to respond with violence whenever we have a problem. Why do we do that, and why don’t other countries do it at the level that we do it?”

“I never have an outline before I start. I just film what happens and construct it from there. What I thought might be the film at the beginning, was certainly not what it was at the end. But that’s a great thing, because I’m surprised all the way through. And you sit there in the audience on the journey with me.”

The climax comes when Moore confronts National Rifle Association vice president Charlton Heston, perched like a crow in his Hollywood mansion, next to ancient film posters of himself, holding in his stomach and blaming gun crime on “mixed ethnicity”. “I’m sick and tired of people like him having the say in our country,” says Moore. “The majority don’t support his position, yet he still gets his way. I want that stopped.”

The shambling director seems to have the hide (and bulk) of an elephant, but is he ever scared of repercussions? ”No. Should I be?” Well, men with guns are scary. “No, men with guns are cowards. That’s why they have guns, right? If they thought their strong beliefs would carry the day, that’s what they’d rely on. But they don’t. I mean, only a coward would use a gun right?” Jonathan Carter 13 November 02

collective preview: michael moore at the roundhouse