Michael and Me. Well, we didn’t get off to the best of starts. I had been tipped off at the Cannes film festival that if I went to a certain beach restaurant at a certain time I might grab an interview with Michael Moore.

I made a beeline for him. “Hi, Michael. Richard Brooks from The Sunday Times in London.”

Fatter than even his pictures suggest, he looked quizzically at me from beneath his “Made in Canada” baseball cap. “I’m not talking to you,” he responded half in jest, half in anger. “You’re News International. Murdoch.”

I knew he regarded this newspaper’s proprietor as one of the bad guys — though perhaps not quite on a par with George W Bush, Moore’s public enemy number one. This public (and wonderfully publicity-generating) spat dates from Moore’s run-in with the US arm of HarperCollins, the publishing company owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Sunday Times.

BACKGROUND

• Sicko review

• Weinstein braces for backlash

• Moore is wrong about the NHS

• Ministering to the Sicko

BACKGROUND

• Moore in hot water for Cuba trip

• Citizen Moore

• Moore's ill wind blows over political agenda

• Review: America: Dude, Where's My Country by Michael Moore

• Tables turned on Fahrenheit 9/11’s maker

Just how good is Mr Good Guy?

Michael Moore is misleading, vain, irritating, greedy, hypocritical, pointless and ineffective. Or is he?

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

The first 50,000 copies of his book Stupid White Men had been printed on September 10, 2001. Moore has claimed often and vociferously that after 9/11 he was asked to tone the book down and remove “harsh references to Bush” before the book was distributed.

But in December 2001 the original book was duly published by HarperCollins with, to quote Moore, “not a single word removed or changed”; it was the bestselling non-fiction book in America in 2002, selling about 2m copies there alone (it has since sold 600,000 in the UK). Moore’s capacity for publicity generating controversy had triumphed again.

Moore is at the centre of a cultural war in America. His books and movies are big box office, and Moore is one of the liberal contingent’s biggest hitters. Yet he has simultaneously spawned a vociferous movement united in opposition to his methods and world view.

In the forefront of this latter industry are the authors of a new book published this week. In Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man, writers David T Hardy and Jason Clarke have turned the tables on Moore by looking at how he uses his camera to present his version of the truth. The book, claim the authors, exposes “the misrepresentations and hypocrisy that have been characteristic of his career”. Ouch.

Meanwhile, the film maker Mike Wilson is finishing a much-awaited documentary, Michael Moore Hates America. Wilson travels from coast to coast in search of the American dream and chases down Moore in an effort to find out why they have such different visions. Wilson “does a Moore” by trying to interview the documentary maker. The backlash has begun.

Moore’s world — like America — is divided. For him there are the good guys and the bad guys. But which one is he? There is the good Moore, who says he gives away a sizeable chunk of his income to worthy causes, and whose movies often side with the little man and the underprivileged.

And then there is the bad Moore, who can be a bully and a hypocrite. He uses private jets, demands the best hotels and sends his daughter to a fee-paying school in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Yet he also claims to be the ordinary working-class guy from the downtrodden town of Flint, Michigan, where he set his first and best documentary, Roger & Me, which looked at how General Motors treated its workforce. In fact his father was a well-paid manager who was able to retire in his early fifties to play golf.

Some of those who have worked for him are not flattering. Moore’s former manager Douglas Urbanski calls him “the most difficult man I’ve worked with. He’s money-obsessed and is one of the most selfish and psychologically unbalanced people I’ve ever met. He pretends to be the little man, but all he cares about is himself”.