by MARK SLUTSKY

Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s 2001 bestseller Fast Food Nation may surprise you. The book, which exposed the often frightening practices of a huge American industry, paved the way for documentaries like Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, but Linklater’s film is no doc; instead, it’s a narrative fiction film very much along the lines of Traffic and Syriana, tracing the parallel storylines of various otherwise unconnected people somehow involved with or affected by the industry.

There’s Greg Kinnear as fast-food chain marketing exec, sent to the fictional town of Cody, Colorado, to investigate reports that “there’s shit in the meat,” Wilmer Valderrama and Catalina Sandino Moreno as Mexican migrant meat-packing plant workers, Kris Kristofferson as a sardonic rancher, Bruce Willis as a cynical middleman—all of whom contribute a little piece to the overall story.

So why not make Fast Food Nation a doc? “I hear they take a long time,” Linklater jokes over the line from Dallas in his friendly Texas drawl. “I know a lot of documentary filmmakers and it sounds like a lot of work. And it takes forever. And I don’t think they pay anything.”

But seriously: “I’d read the book and it never crossed my mind that it was a movie I could make, even though I loved it—it’s a subject matter I’m very interested in. But once Eric mentioned throwing the book out and making a fictional film about it all, about the workers and all that, that’s what hooked me in. I’d been trying to make that movie in some form or fashion for a long time.”

Worker’s romp

That movie, exactly, was, “a movie that would kind of be the viewpoint of industrial workers, from a workers’ standpoint,” Linklater says. “I was an offshore oil worker for two-and-a-half years in my early 20s and I always had crappy jobs—working in restaurants, I was always the busboy, the dishwasher. It was the lowest type of labour.

“I’d had various movies and things over the years I’d tried to get financed, but I never really could. I think people don’t want to pay to watch people work, so it never really happened. I did a pilot for HBO actually, a few years ago, called $5.15 an Hour. It was about minimum wage workers, but they didn’t pick it up as a series. They thought it was too depressing (laughs) even though it was a comedy! I thought it was pretty funny!

“The thought, for people who have never had real jobs like that, of working in a restaurant for minimum wage, they would just kill themselves first. They don’t realize there can be a lot of humour and humanity in that atmosphere, which is what I was trying to bring out. But anyway, that’s a long way of saying I’ve tried to get this viewpoint, which is my own, into movies like this. And Fast Food Nation, it’s a fascinating subject, the industrialization of food. There’s so many issues floating around it—the ramifications are so global, so important—so it was easy for me to come aboard and start working with Eric on the script.”

Making sense of the machine

Fast Food Nation manages, through its interconnected narratives, to touch on topics as diverse as migrant workers, workplace safety, meth use, obesity, modern marketing, urban sprawl, cops in schools, abuse of eminent domain—the list goes on and on.

“Fast food is so ubiquitous in our culture,” Linklater says. “You can’t move and not touch it, it’s got its hooks into everything. So it was an opportunity to touch on a lot of subjects in different ways. It says a lot about our culture, about our society. When we say ‘Fast Food Nation’ I don’t even think of it as just the food, I think of it as a kind of a corporate mindset. Kris Kristofferson says in the movie, ‘It’s not good people or bad people, it’s this machine that’s taken over the country.’ And I kind of believe that. That’s sort of my viewpoint on the whole thing—it’s bigger than all of us. We’re all just responding to this global marketplace, this borderless globalization of our economy.”

But it’s a machine, Linklater clearly thinks, that could be reined in if enough people demand it. “It’s weird, fast food, on one hand, satisfies part of our human thinking about efficiency and productivity,” he says. “It’s like, wow, that’s a nice delivery system. Boom! You drive through, you get your burger, you pay for it. That’s kind of a triumph of the industrial age. But it’s so damn unhealthy. I think they’ve got the right system, they just need to back it up a notch and make it all healthy. You can do that, it’s just not currently in their economic interest. If consumers demand it, they could do it overnight.”

Fast Food Nation opens Friday, Nov. 17

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