It might have been one of the seven signs of the coming Apocalypse, Michael Moore, peace demonstrators and the Blue Angels all converging on San Francisco at the same time.

To make the day even more surreal, Moore who prides himself on his everyman persona, was holding court at the posh Ritz Carlton on Nob Hill.

Not to worry, Moore hasn’t gone the way of celebrity. He was still dressed in a baseball cap, wind breaker and hadn’t touched a razor for a week or so. And he wasn’t staying at the Ritz, it was where his latest movie’s production company set up interviews for the filmmaker.

The Blue Angels were in town to practice for the weekend fleet week festivities, demonstrations were taking place protesting the Presidents new war powers and Moore was in San Francisco to promote his movie, Bowling for Columbine, which opened in the Bay Area earlier this month.

Moore started his movie expecting to find the preponderance of guns to blame for the violence in the U.S. but changed direction during the process to concentrating on the nation’s racism and culture of fear.

Yet, many will accuse Moore’s film of feeding on that fear. Interviews with militia members, including James Nichols, the brother of Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols, and film of Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold from the school security cameras both do nothing to calm the nation’s fears.

"We had to be real careful to not to the very thing that we are chastising the media for doing," Moore said. "During the part of the film where it shows the various actual people being killed on camera, I kept cutting that down. I trimmed out of it before you would see any horrible blood blowing out of their brains or any of that stuff.

But fear is a good thing. You do need to be afraid of some things. That’s part of our instinct. The problem is we are told to be afraid of everything, so our fear compass is off. We don’t know what to be afraid of anymore. There are things I do want you to be afraid of. I want you to be afraid of the guy sitting in the White House. They are not serving at the will of the people. And he is using 9-11 as a cover for his agenda. That is something to be truly afraid of."

When asked if he had any regrets about supporting Ralph Nader, possibly giving George W. Bush the White House, he said, "Oh absolutely not. Gore would do the same thing. He just wouldn’t sound as stupid, which is probably more dangerous."

While many of the issues Moore tackles are ripe subjects for journalists, Moore considers himself a filmmaker, not a journalist. Filmmaker is what he puts on his his 1040 under occupation.

But things could have been different.

Moore tells a story EVC students could relate to. On his first day of college in Michigan he couldn’t find a parking spot, and then decided college wasn’t for him. The rest is filmmaking history.

"When I make films like this I set out first and foremost to make a good movie. It’s not to make a political statement. If you put the politics before the art, nobody will latch on to the politics. You have to make sure you are making a good movie first that way millions of more people are going to be affected by the politics.

"I’ve chosen to be a filmmaker. My first mission is to make sure when you leave the theater, you felt like you had two great hours at the movies. Something you rarely get these days. I go to three movies a week and it’s getting harder and harder to go because they suck. I can’t tell you how many times I leave the movies and I tell my wife, ‘I must save the cinema.’ Forget about George W. Bush, I must save the cinema."

Moore has been criticized that his movies are more about him than his subject.

"I’m watching myself knocking on the corporate headquarters doors, wondering what is this guy doing there. What’s wrong with this picture? This guy is a ball cap, with no college education, is the one asking the hard questions of these corporate CEOs? Where’s the business press, where’s the journalists who went to school for this, who are being paid for this. I should be sitting on a lazy-boy somewhere, watching sports. Me doing that up there is an indictment of our media."

But thanks to the lack of parking at some Michigan college many years ago Moore isn’t home sitting in his lazy boy. Instead he is entertaining us while tackling many of the hard questions.