When Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano, aka The Yes Men, put up a website satirising the World Trade Organisation, they little expected to receive emails inviting them to give talks as representatives of the WTO. Rather than putting people straight, they used the opportunity to take their satire from the internet to lecture halls and board rooms in Europe, America and Australia. Their activities are now the subject of The Yes Men, a funny and disturbing documentary by the makers of 1999's horror doc American Movie.

You play roles in your work and don't work under your real names. How much of the way you present yourselves to the media is a construct?

Andy Bichlbaum: Besides the names we're very straightforward with the media. But that just sort of happened. Our real names are just so ridiculous we can't possibly use them. In any case, my father invented his last name when he came to the United States from Europe and had fake names during the war, as a Jew hiding out in Belgium. What is real/what is not is sort of arbitrary.
Mike Bonanno: Same thing in my family.

How would you define yourselves? Are you performance artists, situationists, activists?

AB: We're activists who use any means at our disposal. People have been using funny techniques to attract media attention and to make points in the public realm in various ways, and that's all that we're doing.

There's an irony in what you're doing: 'identity correction', as you call it, is trying to make dishonest people honest, but you're using dishonest means to do it...

AB: They're honest means though. We're impersonating them and making them into full people that come across clearly. They represent themselves in this fluid kind of, 'Here we are, we're nice,' and, of course, they're really sinister. So we just cut away the rest and leave the sinister part. We're not using deceit. It's the opposite.

So it's a public service?

MB: It's a kind of therapy, but they don't know it. We're working through it for them.

Was there a part of you that wanted to be exposed when you did your first 'presentation' to the WTO?

AB: That was the idea when we started. We thought for sure we would be. We actually wrote the first speech in order for it to work that way.

So you didn't expect this to go further than the Salzburg event?

AB: No, we really didn't. Since we couldn't get reactions from the delegates in Salzburg, no matter what we tried, we started sending them emails announcing dire things that had happened to the speaker. We prodded them for information, and the email exchange was re-printed over a full page in the New York Times. We thought surely this is going to end it, but it didn't. It might be that this film coming out won't stop us doing things either. Who knows?

Your documentary is one of a slew of left-leaning political projects that have come out of America in the past year. Why do you think this is?

MB:This strategy is born of a certain amount of desperation. There are stories that don't make it into the press. This recent stunt with the anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster [Andy went on BBC TV as a representative of Dow Chemicals and promised to pay compensation to the victims of the 1984 tragedy] was the result of desperation because it's not reported in the United States, period. So this prank got it in the news. But there was no other way that it was going to be reported, which is pathetic and sad.

Did you have any qualms about the mixed effect of your action, despite your obvious good intentions?

AB: The several hours were an error. We thought it was going to be discovered immediately. We thought Dow would be awake enough to notice immediately, contact the BBC and say 'Hey', and maybe they'd cut us off in the middle. But that didn't happen. Dow took a full hour or more to say anything and then the BBC had to verify it and retract it. So that was an error. But then, you know, you have to look at it in perspective and say, well, 20 years of suffering, for the ones who are still alive, versus two hours of false hopes... The pay off is that in the US there was extensive coverage, and that's Dow's hometown.

Is the WTO issue dead as far as the Yes Men are concerned?

AB: Yeah, we didn't get anymore invitations after that. But it's a live issue in that it's a matter of grave concern and it's not going away. Because Bush is now president it doesn't mean it's not important. Partly getting out of the country [Andy lives in Paris, Mike in Dundee] really helps you to see that. If you're in the United States it is just so oppressive to think that he's president and you think about it constantly. But here you look around and you think about other things.

The Yes Men is released in UK cinemas on Friday 18th February 2005.