Michael Moore 'impressed' by Taylor Swift getting involved in politics

America needs saving and, if it's going to be saved, the country's young people will be the ones to do it.

That's the opinion of filmmaker Michael Moore, whose new documentary Farenheit 11/9 is released in the UK on Friday 19 October.

He believes that a "youth uprising" has been taking place since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida, this year.

"They marched on Washington DC in the largest single-day demonstration in the history of the country, and they have been active all summer and fall," he told Radio 1 Newsbeat.

"I think we're going to hopefully see some change as a result of this youth uprising."

Newsbeat spoke to some of the teenagers organising against gun laws in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, but there's a country-wide opportunity to make change coming in November.

Americans will be voting in the mid-term elections on the 6 November to decide who will sit in Congress - similar to MPs.

President Donald Trump himself is not up for re-election, but his ability to govern in the final two years of his first term will hinge upon the outcome.

Michael Moore has inexplicably been wearing hats with various media organisations on them over the last few years

And Michael, whose film looks primarily at what he thinks led to Trump's election, believes that for the first time in a long time the rival Democratic Party have political candidates young people can be happy voting for.

"The time of these old white guys ruling the world is over," he said.

"The young generation coming up is a generation being led in large part by women, by people of colour, and by an age group that has a lot to lose if they don't fix what's going on right now."

He's talking about people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old working-class woman from a Puerto Rican family, who beat a veteran Democrat to become a candidate for her New York district in June.

Or Ammar Campa-Najjar, a Mexican-Palestinian-American who's fighting to oust a Republican in California.

If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wins, she'll become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress

Michael Moore says that in previous years, candidates like these haven't existed.

"We have 100m people in the US that don't vote because they've given up. They don't see either party as representing them."

• A simple guide to the US mid-terms

And he thinks that feeling disengaged because of a lack of representation - in both America and the UK - is a situation people need to be "vigilant" about.

In his film, there's a scene where we see Adolf Hitler addressing a rally in Germany. But he's not speaking in German - instead, it's Donald Trump's voice and words leaving his mouth. The intended comparison seems obvious.

But Moore says he's more concerned about comparing people "in the UK and the US right now to the people of Germany in 1933".

"The comparisons are striking in terms of how easy it was in otherwise liberal democracies for a leader to first get elected, and then take over.

"It's why eternal vigilance by the people over the leaders is the way this has to work - the leaders have to be our servants, not the other way around.

"I think the film does a really good job of showing people, regardless of what country you live in, just how much we have to be on top of things."

As a result, Moore welcomed Taylor Swift's recent intervention into American politics - where she revealed her political leanings for the first time.

"I was so impressed and so moved by her statement, and I think a lot of people were too. I think that she now may be a very strong force - a gale force wind in this election."

The US mid-terms take place on 6 November.

Farenheit 11/9 is the latest documentary from Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, who over the course of his career has made films arguing against US gun culture, the war on terror, and capitalism.

He holds the record for the highest-grossing documentary in US history, Farenheit 9/11, about the war on terror. But in America, where his latest doc has been out for a little while, reviews haven't been great.

The New York Post called him "irrelevant in the age of Trump", Variety published a piece asking how he "lost his audience", and IndieWire went so far as to compare him to the subject of his documentary: Donald Trump himself.

The film is out in cinemas from Friday 19 October.

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