The Yes Men

In their new film The Yes Men Fix The World, political pranksters Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano document many of their ingenious and outlandish stunts over the past few years. From setting up fake consultancy websites to simply blagging their way to an empty conference podium, they have managed to pose as spokesmen for the like of the World Trade Organisation and ExxonMobil – and then have proceeded to lampoon them in the most extreme ways.

LWLies: What sort of impact do you hope to make with the film?

Bichlbaum: Well we’re hoping to enrol a lot of people into direct action. There a bunch of issues that are really pressing and important. The primary one for us right now is climate change but there’s a whole bunch of other social and environmental injustice issues that if we don’t fix, pretty soon we could end up being really, really fucked in the long term.

Bonanno: But we find when people see the film they leave wanting to do something. So basically we want that to happen – we want people to actually do something afterwards. It’s pretty simple.

LWLies: When it comes to your stunts, you have managed to fool a lot of big organisations. What goes into getting into that position?

Bonanno: It’s not actually that difficult. It can be difficult. You can either set up a fake website and hope that eventually someone stumbles onto it, which is how the BBC stunt happened. We’ve often conned our way into conferences by posing as Public Relation companies. We call up saying, ‘Our big client Exxon wants to speak.’ You can also just go to these conferences and look for an opportunity to speak. At one conference that we went to, it was a lunch and we basically just went up to the podium and the technicians turned on the cameras because they thought it was supposed to happen and gave a little address.

LWLies: Are you worried that in the future this film will make those stunts more difficult to pull off?

Bichlbaum: It’s not like we need to be the ones pulling them off, there’s a lot of people who could be the faces of these stunts.

Bonanno: We’re actually launching a little official networking site to get in touch with people and challenge them. It would be, like, ‘Go to this conference!’ and then give all the information about how you do it. Also, things like how to build a hidden camera, etc. It’s not very hard actually, it takes half an hour for somebody to do that.

LWLies: So the Yes Men, that’s obviously just not you, it’s more like a network, right?

Bonanno: We’ve always worked with a bunch of friends. If we know somebody who is good at making something we need we’ll work with them, like making costumes, designs, strange animations. But that kind of thing we’re now trying to expand through our mailing list. So when you sign up, you also say what you can do. Occasionally we’ll send out an e-mail saying, ‘Anybody out there know how to swim really well? We have a swimming thing planned.’

Andy Bichlbaum: Yeah exactly. Sewing and swimming, we’re looking for people who do that.

Mike Bonanno Sewing, and getting arrested.

LWLies: Is it hard keeping a straight face when doing these speeches?

Mike Bonanno : Well, if you do crack a smile or something, which I have done, it’s not necessarily a give away. It’s like, ‘Oh, the guy from the WTO is laughing!’ or, ‘The guy from Exxon is laughing about something.’ You just blend it into the speech, like smiling as you say ‘starving will be the new black.’ It’s a funny line!

LWLies: At the end of the day, do you feel you get results? Do you feel you actually changed anything in the grand scheme of things?

Andy Bichlbaum: Yeah, in the case of the Bhopal stunt on the BBC, there were 600 articles in the US press about it. It contributes to a movement that’s eventually going to force Dow to do something about it. It’s going to set a global precedent where corporations can’t do that sort of thing anymore. You can’t look at each individual action we did and think, ‘Oh, that saved that,” we have no expectation of working that way. It’s about contributing to a movement where thousands of people are fighting to change things, and if they didn’t exist, things would be much worse than they are. Environmentally it would be much more fucked than it is. There would be no hope of fighting climate change or reducing our carbon emissions. Right now there’s hope.

Check out The Yes Men’s official site to see how you can get involved.