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What are The Yes Men all about?

We want to make the point that if you let corporations do what they want, the world will go to hell in a hand basket. We advocate that citizens be able to decide their own futures rather than let big corporations do it.

How do you feel about reactions to pranks like the one in which you unveiled an industry standard for determining how many deaths are acceptable when achieving large profits?

It’s a continual surprise. There’s lots of research showing that, under certain conditions, when people are given a message by someone in authority they absorb it and do what the authority says. What’s shocking isn’t so much that people believe what we say or that we are the corporate people we’re pretending to be; it’s that they don’t react when these entities say horrible things.

Climate change is going to be your next mission. What made you go for that?

When you have very powerful, wealthy, entrenched interests in the US fighting action on climate change, the only way to fight is to take to the streets and demand action. We have a president and a lot of people in Congress who wouldn’t mind doing the right thing, but they’re beholden to certain interests. If they can point to people protesting, then they have proof the public want action. They can say to the industrial forces pressuring them: I can’t do what you’re telling me to do because people are taking to the streets. This is a crucial part of democracy.

Will it work? What about climate deniers?

We don’t know. We hope so. There are millions and millions of people who feel very strongly that it’s a big problem we need to do something about. Even if a small percentage of them take to the streets, they are going to be visible. We have a project to appeal to the climate change deniers: we’re asking people to write tabloid articles in the style of climate deniers. We’re going to launch them in a website later this month: see .

At one point you claimed to be a spokesman for Dow Chemical, saying Dow would pay whatever it took to clean up after the accident at Bhopal. What effect did that have?

It wiped 3 per cent off their stock price; we didn’t expect that. There were reports that the Securities and Exchange Commission was looking for us, and people suspected we might be short-trading. It goes to show what our culture has come to, when the only reason people could think of for doing a thing like that was to make money.

Your day jobs are in academia. What do you make of the way research is funded?

We feel strong sympathy for the people doing amazing research who can’t get funded because the application isn’t a big moneymaker. In pharmaceuticals, chronic illness is privileged over curable illness because it makes a lot more money. You’ve got to wonder what our priorities are.

Read more of this interview and a review of the film at www.newscientist.com/article/dn17573