Loosely adapting Eric Schlosser’s best-selling non-fiction book Fast Food Nation, Richard Linklater’s new film is an affectionate comedy that critiques American corporate culture by telling the stories of the working class people it often neglects.

BY HOWARD FEINSTEIN

In Fast Food Nation, Richard Linklater’S fictional adaptation of Eric Schlosser’s best-selling exposé of the fast-food industry, there are no slackers. (Well, okay, one alienated teen does secretly live in the kitchen of a burger franchise.) With his new film, his second to be released in 2006, Linklater creates a world pitting the empowered against the powerless, the enlightened against the acquiescent, the manipulators against the manipulated — a melodrama in which the forces of good and evil are strongly delineated.

But where Schlosser kept his sights on the corporate shenanigans behind the meatpacking and processing giants, Linklater foregrounds and thereby humanizes the most unfortunate victims of this multibillion-dollar business: the migrant laborers who maintain it while working under deplorable conditions. And if Schlosser maintained a cool, scientific head with his reporting, Linklater brings affect to the enterprise. Catalina Sandino Moreno’s Sylvia and Wilmer Valderrama’s Raul, both illegal Mexican workers, have as much as or more screen time as the naïve corporate rep Don, played by Greg Kinnear, who takes a whitewashed tour of their Colorado plant but later discovers more than he is willing to acknowledge. Ethan Hawke’s Uncle Pete, a Linklater invention, is a progressive voice in this Colorado wilderness. Though things get nasty, a ray of hope remains.

Fast Food Nation is the 46-year-old director’s most political film. Linklater has, however, been heading this way for a while. This year’s animated A Scanner Darkly, from the Philip K. Dick novel, deals with such uncomfortably resonant political themes as paranoia and government surveillance. The Bush years seem to have prodded the director to urge his characters to take action. We first spoke at The American Pavilion in Cannes just after the world premiere of the film. Three months later we followed up with a phoner from his home in Austin, Texas. He and I attended the same high school in Houston, though I never worked on an offshore oil rig or learned to feign a Yankee accent.

Unlike in Schlosser’s book, you make the illegal immigrants in Fast Food Nation a major focus. You begin and end with them. Why did you choose to concentrate on them? Living in a border state, you’re aware of the ways inexpensive labor comes to industry — or the way industry goes to inexpensive labor — and how this is now a national and worldwide phenomenon. [Illegal immigration] is the lifeblood of the meatpacking and meat-processing industry, but we’re encouraged not to think about it or care about [these laborers] too much. So I just thought this was a poignant story. I know a lot of people who came across [the border], and it can be pretty rough. It’s gotten more and more dangerous. On the May 1 walkout [this year], every meatpacking facility in the country shut down, yet it got no publicity. Those Middle American facilities couldn’t operate that day. I know in George Bush’s heart he doesn’t feel these people should be made felons. He’s playing politics, like always, with his advisers. And the heads of these industries don’t want to be held responsible. They don’t want to be CEOs arrested for employing felons.

This film is probably the most overtly political picture you’ve done. I’m as political as the next person whose goal in life is to want to be informed. I’m healthily aware, and I’m cynical about the motives of big government and big business. So, yeah, I’m ready to take my lumps, I guess, making a film that draws attention to something. But what sucks is being called anti-American. You really do love your country, and it’s sad that if you make something that questions the bottom line of a certain industry, that that’s anti-American. Like, is McDonald’s America? I thought people discussing things and having an open forum was America.

Do you remember the bumper stickers all over Texas around the time of the Vietnam War? “Love it or leave it.” Those are the choices: Love the agenda of a few, unquestionably, or leave it. I don’t think Thomas Paine would agree [that questioning the business practices of an industry] is un-American. I don’t think Thomas Jefferson would agree. In such a free-market system, the only semblances of democracy are the demands and voices of opposition heard from the margins, while the business-efficiency model, the behemoth, just moves forward on its own agenda. There’s really no human soul guiding that ship. It’s all profit-driven, without any regard for the health of the animals, the workers and the environment. Obviously the animals and the environment can’t speak for themselves, but the workers really can’t speak for themselves either [because] there are no unions. It’s up to everybody [else] to decide, hey, let’s do better here for the health of the world.

Is the Bush administration any worse than previous administrations in terms of the fast-food and livestock industries? They are. There is much less federal oversight. It was never good. You can put in a Democrat and not much is going to change here. But the way they let the wolves guard the henhouse, the revolving door between the industry and the government watchdog — the Bush administration is much worse on that level. They really don’t care about people’s health. You’re just likely to get a little more oversight with the Democrats. Policy-wise, it’s hard to tell the difference sometimes in this world. Clinton pushed through NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], and the result of that has been disastrous. It would be naïve to think, Oh, put a Democrat in and it will all get better.

Uncle Pete, Ethan Hawke’s character, is not in the book. Is he a surrogate for you? He’s actually a surrogate for an uncle I have, who, when I was 15, came and lived with us for a little while. He was from California, he had these radical politics and pretty antiauthoritarian notions. I was like the class-president type, and he kind of radicalized me a little bit. He’s probably not even aware of it to this day. I like Uncle Pete a lot. I think I am everybody in this story, but [the fast food cashier/budding environmentalist] Amber and her growing awareness [throughout the film] probably [represented] me. [She is] someone looking to see what the true cost of commodified and cheap fast food is. Once you see that whole system and the toll it takes, you can make a decision how you want to contribute or not contribute to that industry. But I’m also Don, Greg Kinnear’s character — a guy who is a little older. He’s got a family, and he’s self-interested in that way. What do you do to make a change in this world without hurting your family? There are little compromises that everyday people make. And I also feel I’m the migrants. I worked as an offshore oil worker out of Houston in the Gulf of Mexico for two and a half years when I was 20 to 23, so I know what it feels like to be at the absolute bottom of an industry, to wear a hardhat, steel-toe boots and be a grunt laborer, to know you are completely expendable and to feel the way the shit rolls downhill right on you.

Was Don someone you and Schlosser came up with to tie things together? Yeah. That was our adaptive process over a few years. Once you throw out the book altogether and try to fictionalize this world, who do you concentrate on? What will tell the story? What will be meaningful? I thought it was important to show a guy who’s not a villain, who’s not a bad guy. He works for the company. He’s trying to do the right thing by his family and by his people. When he finds out stuff, he’s indignant. But you have choices when you discover things. You can either act on them or incorporate them into your overall thinking of the way things are. Every American had that choice when we discovered that our own country was torturing people. We never really thought we would do that, but now that we do, I guess that’s the way things are. I didn’t see protests in the streets. I didn’t see the arrest of government officials.

How did you and Schlosser collaborate? We got together numerous times. I’d go to where he lives, he’d come to where I live, we’d sit around for a few days. We’d often write independently. It’s not like we sat in the same room and hammered out the whole script. We did it over several years. I was working on other things, he was working on other things, so it took a while.

I read that you used Sherwood Anderson’s [1919 short story collection] Winesburg, Ohio as a jumping-off point. Why did you decide to do a fictional study of various characters and not a doc? It’s a narrative strategy that has a lot of precedents in literature and in film. It’s a way to tell a story from multiple viewpoints and to try to get around subject matter that is pretty vast. It seemed logical to set it in one area and deal with the inhabitants of that area who get there from very different angles. I was excited about it. I have a history of ensemble film work, and I like that as a storytelling method.

Why Colorado? Cody is a fictional town, but Colorado is a really interesting backdrop, a state that’s undergone a lot of change. It has a huge meat industry, a big ranching industry. [It’s got] the beauty of the Aspens and the Tellurides and then a big methamphetamine industry. It used to be a totally Democratic state that’s been completely overrun by the super-right wing. NORAD, the mountains in the background — it’s kind of creepy. It’s kind of a desperate place in a lot of ways. Three or four years ago I went up there with Eric and met ranchers and workers and people he knew. Also I just traveled around with my eyes open, checking out stuff. I saw houses up on blocks without water. There are building subdivisions with no water, no city services. We spent the night on this idyllic 14,000-acre ranch. It was a beautiful morning when we drove back, and there was a dead body at the side of the road! Someone had pulled off the freeway and dumped this dead woman. It was probably drug-related, I don’t know. They use Colorado as an economic model, like, We’ll move our meat plant to your town and it will create all these jobs. They sell people on it. But really the jobs they create are mostly for the migrant workers, because they don’t pay well and they are dangerous. The locals don’t want to do that kind of stuff. Then, what do you know? They’re polluting the local area. It smells horrible. They talk a good game, but these growth industries — animal and food processing, and prisons — they’re pretty horrible for a community.

Where else did you film? Mexico and Austin. I set a lot of the interiors in Austin. We shot some of the cattle-kill scenes [in Mexico]. We couldn’t get any of the U.S. [slaughterhouses] to let us in. The Mexicans let us in because they liked that our story dealt with the plight of the Mexican workers who go north.

There was a controversy a while back about your being banned from shooting in the fast-food franchises. We headed them off at the pass. We worked undercover under an assumed name, because we knew they wouldn’t like the idea of us making this movie. I thought the film would be less harsh than the book as far as being a direct attack. The movie is fiction. There is, I hope, some realism behind it, but I thought it was less threatening than the book. But we were burdened by the name Fast Food Nation.

Have you always been a vegetarian? Not always — since 1983. I certainly didn’t grow up that way. It took me a series of illuminations. Once I really understood how the system works, the exploitation of the animals, the workers, the environment, once I had my eyes opened and informed myself, I could make a life decision to not support these industries.

You look fine. I guess you’re not missing any essential nutrients. I’m not a health nut or anything. I eat a lot of chocolate. For me it was first the animals and the environment. But the older I get, the more I have to think about health and stuff, so I’m kind of grateful. I don’t think my arteries are totally clogged.

What are you working on now? I have a Chet Baker project that has been in development for a while. It’s not happening any time soon. I have four or five scripts and one thing I’m writing. I don’t know what I’m doing next. I’m kind of antsy.

Do you think that if people wind up thinking that Fast Food Nation is an issue film, they will come and see it? I have no earthly idea. It might be one of those films that the more you hear about it, the more you want to rent it someday. I hope there is a type of viewer who would want to go on that trip. By November, when it comes out, the temperature might have changed. The midterm elections might be an interesting moment, but that’s a total wild card. I’m often wrong about my own films. I’m an optimist and I think, everyone should see this, everyone will like it. But I’m constantly disappointed.