When Michael Met Sacha

What, you may or may not find yourselves wondering, could agitprop documentary director Michael Moore possibly have in common with guerrilla-comedy king Sacha Baron Cohen? Quite a bit, it just so happens, as a chance encounter at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival led to a mutual gush-a-thon between the two mischief-making filmmakers:

Cohen told Moore he had drawn inspiration from the filmmaker’s documentaries, in which Moore doggedly pursues corporate and political bosses and puts himself into uncomfortable situations.

“I said to him, ‘But yeah, I’ve never done anything like wrestle naked with another guy on the floor of an insurance-brokers or mortgage-brokers convention,” Moore told The Associated Press. “So after I saw ‘Borat,’ if he says I was an inspiration for those things, I now have to up the ante for him. So we sailed into the mined waters of Guantanamo Bay with sick 9/11 workers and a bullhorn.”

Not only did Cohen inspire Moore to attempt larger-scale and ballsier stunts than ever before, but his faux-Kazakh counterpart’s misadventures also provided some highly effective field tactics, ultimately resulting in securing Moore’s ill 9/11 workers the medical attention they so desperately needed after the Sicko director won a nude wrestling match with a wiry guard by suffocating him with his anus.

• Moore: Borat steeled him for Guantanamo [Yahoo News]