You once said you considered Roger and Me a failure, because your goal for the film was to save your hometown, and that didn't happen. Do you feel the same way about Fahrenheit 9/11 now that Bush has been re-elected?

No. I mean, Bush is still in office, but the film is about the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism. Those were the original reasons I made the film. It wasn't about the election. The feeling I had after Roger and Me was different because those of us from Flint [Michigan] who made the movie felt like we had the power to change things. In this case, you know, I wasn't the candidate. I couldn't make John Kerry give a very simple answer to what he would do with this war.

Do you think a possible good outcome of Bush winning could be that more people, particularly young people, are becoming radicalized?

I'm confident that's what will happen. I hate to think that that's a good thing, because it means over the next four years some people, many people, are going to have to suffer. But, you know, my hope was that young people would get out and vote, and they voted in record numbers. I don't know why that story hasn't been told. It was the largest turnout of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds since eighteen-year-olds were given the vote in '72. And it was the only age group where Kerry got the majority.

Did you buy the whole red-state/blue-state story line that came out of the election, or do you think it's more of an urban-rural divide?

It is more urban-rural, and we have become and are becoming a more urban country. So this is not a problem that we will have for a long time. For now, we need to send care packages to the pockets of resistance in the red states, to help them out. And, you know, we should just do what they did in California, where they had a ballot initiative for stem-cell research. Instead of trying to convince red states that that's important, let's just do it ourselves, and when we find a cure for Alzheimer's and things like that, sadly, we won't be able to help your parents or grandparents in the red states. We'll just take care of our own people. We'll raise the minimum wage, like they did in Florida on a ballot initiative. We'll just do the things that we need to do. And I think that we can create a good life for ourselves in the blue states.

Do you give any credence to these Internet conspiracy theories about the voting machines in Ohio?

Nah. And I don't have a double standard here. I've stressed since 2000 that Gore won the popular vote. Now, even if Kerry won Ohio, clearly more people across the country wanted Bush than Kerry. So there you go. Deal with it.

How depressed were you in the days after the election?

I cut the TV off and stayed in the house for about three days. Then, finally, a friend of mine said, "Our daughter is in a fifth-grade play. Do you wanna come watch it?" [Laughs] And I said, "Yeah, that sounds like something I would like to do."

What was the play?

It was about the life of Susan B. Anthony. I sat in the back of the classroom listening to them re-enact her life, and I thought about how women had been trying to get the vote since the 1840s, and those first women never lived to see a voting booth -- and yet they never gave up. They were ostracized, shunned, called un-American, anti-God, anti-family, and they never gave up. And at the same time I started to tear up, thinking, "These poor kids. What have we done to them now with this election?" But it was good to get out of the house [laughs].

What was your favorite film of the year?

I usually try to see if there was something I went to see a second time. I did do that with The Passion of the Christ, but that was only because I wanted to take my dad. I liked Sideways and Hotel Rwanda, but I think the best time I had at the movies this year was at Dodgeball. Seriously, I laughed so hard. Rip Torn as the coach: "If you can dodge cars, you can dodge balls!" [Laughs]

What's the best thing you read this year?

I would say Thomas Frank's book, What's the Matter With Kansas?

That turned out to be very prescient. But didn't he get slammed for being condescending toward red-state people?

He's from Kansas! He has the right to write about it. People have got to quit being so sensitive, especially when the pundits try to spin shit. Like, I'm out here in Hollywood right now, and everyone is saying, "Oh, maybe we should be quiet." Are you crazy? You're listening to these Republicans telling you to be quiet? Of course they want you to be quiet, because they don't want you to discover the secret that they know, which is that America loves Hollywood, America loves actors and America loves to vote for actors. That's why Republicans run them: Reagan, Arnold, Gopher from The Love Boat, Sonny Bono.

They're really setting up Schwarzenegger to be president.

Totally. So my question to these people here is, "Who's our Arnold? And when are we going to start running him?"

Do you have an answer?

Yeah, I have a lot of answers [laughs]. I don't know if they want to run. Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, Robert Redford. America loves these people and trusts them, and they are smart, too.

Are you sort of serious about this?

I'm absolutely serious. You see, we think we got to run the guy who can write the legislation and set the policy. But the people who vote for Bush know that he doesn't set the policy and write the laws. They just like him personally. They like what they see, which is the act. They like the character. They like the C student. They like the cowboy and the ranch. There's no ranch. That's a movie set that Karl Rove created, you know? But that's OK. It's a comforting image. And we have to run the wonk.

The guy who's lecturing you.

Right. You know, "Hey, let's get Evan Bayh! And we can have Harry Reid as the Democratic leader in the Senate. That's right! Harry Reid will lead the revolution." Are you kidding me? Americans love stars. Clinton was a rock star.

Did you have a favorite song this year?

On my speaking tour, Eddie Vedder and Mike McCready came onstage in Seattle and did "Masters of War," but they also did that Cat Stevens song from the end of Harold and Maude. [Sings] "If you want to sing out, sing out/And if you want to be free, be free/'Cause there's a million things to be." It's kind of a whimsical, hopeful thing, and that, back-to-back with "Masters of War," kind of summed up my mood [laughs]. There was anger but also this belief in the goodness of people, that they will eventually come around and do the right thing.