Michael Keaton and Cast of ‘The Founder’ Discuss the Legacy of McDonald’s Man Ray Kroc

Brendan Reynolds

Telling the origin story of the controversial McDonald’s fast food empire, “The Founder” shadows the ethically hollow and singularly ambitious life of McDonald’s premier executive, Ray Kroc.  With a nuanced and cogent portrayal of Kroc’s rise in success and cultural notoriety, Michael Keaton leads the film’s ensemble cast, including Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch as Kroc’s founding business partners, the McDonald brothers.  The story gives justice to the brothers in recognizing them as the true pioneers of the revolutionary “fast food” service model they invented, as well as their eventual staunch opposition to Kroc’s insatiable capitalistic drive.  Laura Dern also co-stars as Kroc’s beleaguered wife.

The actors, director John Lee Hancock, screenwriter Robert Seigel, and producer Jeremy Renner, discussed the the narrative objectives of the film, as well as the socio-cultural ramifications of the Kroc/McDonald’s legacy.  

“I love stories where there’s a lot of gray,” Renner said. “This couldn’t be more gray. Nothing with this character and this story is black and white. And also what the writers and director had done, to not force feed any value or moral, or righteousness onto the audience. It just sort of spells it out and you choose what you feel about capitalism and the morality of capitalism. It’s that “greyness” that is just sexy to me, I love it.”

Screenwriter Robert Siegel noted his fascination for characters on a spiritually darker quest. “I just thought it should be told with Ray Kroc as the lead character, because I just saw him as a far darker character. When you’re talking about Charles Foster Kane, or Daniel Plainview, the Daniel Day-Lewis character from “There Will Be Blood,” they’re all told from the perspective of the bad guy. And I just think that makes for a more interesting movie, than people who are as kind and bright and wonderful as the McDonald brothers were.”  

In discussing the socio-environmental and moral imperatives the story invokes, Offerman said: “As someone who considers myself a fan of small agriculture, at first I was nervous when I got the script, I said, is this going to be for the ‘McChicken’ factory, or is this going to for the little guy?  So I was thrilled to discover that the truth of the story is on the side of, you know having 10,000 cattle on five acres of land is not a healthy thing for our environment. So, I was not very excited about the story of how the business evolved, or how Kroc appropriated it, but it was the details of how the brothers with their sweat equity and elbow grease, these hardworking brothers, finally struck on this brilliant idea, that’s what really got me.”

Keaton noted: “They changed society and they changed food.  You know when you have to hire machinist to build an assembly line to deliver this food, that led to a portable society and a disposable society.”  Dern expressed her feelings on the larger political issue in the film. “The subversive question that interested me the most, is can capitalism hold compassion?  And I like to think this film succeeds as a politically subversive commentary on this question of empathy vs. corporations, and if there is a place for both. I would also love to add that I saw the film with my daughter who just turned 12, and I was talking about my favorite shot, which just brings me to tears, of these two gentlemen, Offerman and Carroll Lynch, with their arms around each other, watching the McDonald’s portion of their sign be removed. And my daughter said, “mom, you know the way those brothers were holding each other at the end, that’s the way I felt after President Obama’s farewell address, because we just don’t know what’s next.”

Did Kroc have any admirable character qualities? “There’s a moment when Kroc could have told the truth about the origin of the company,” said Carroll Lynch. “And you might not feel so badly about what happens, if he could have just given someone else credit for was accomplished, and if he could have just been humble enough to go, ‘there were these two brothers who had this incredible idea, and I figured out a way to make it happed on every street in America with this other guy’s help.’ But at every moment when he has the opportunity to tell the truth, he can’t do it, because he needed to be the guy. I also loved a moment in the story, where you watch him digest the lie over time, and it becomes the truth to him. So I think that is very indicative of where we are at today, which is what we are told is in some ways, to many of us is more important than the actual truth.”

Director John Lee Hancock spoke about the historical context. “Kroc was a very, very hard worker, and you have to remember that coming out of World War II, America was in a place where we had kicked ass, we won the war, and the sentiment was ‘we want it, we deserve it, and we want it now.’ And I think everybody was thinking, ‘now is my time,’ because the country was thriving. Ray Kroc at that point was in his 50s, and I think he felt that it was his time to ring the bell.”  

The filmmakers went on to discuss the international vision of the “American Dream” and whether the film exemplified the past vision of that dream, or its exaggerated contemporary version. “You know we could go on and on about consumerism and waste and greed,” Keaton said. “But the European perception of what the “American Dream” is, when they talk about it, they do it in relation to billions of dollars, and mansions, and an extravagant lifestyle of owning jets and islands and that sort of thing. And that’s fascinating to me, because unless I missed something, the ‘American Dream’ in its simplest form, is that if you work hard enough, you can afford a house, and a car to get you back and forth to work, and have a couple of kids who can attend a good school, and you get a vacation, maybe. And by the way, that ain’t a bad thing, and I think that’s what it was, and that’s not what the perception is now. I think now it’s turned into this sort of ugly thing.”

And what was the real conflict in the story? Good guys versus bad guys? “It’s not about these two brothers who thought small, going up against this man who thought big. The McDonald brothers thought big, but it’s really a story about two brothers who thought big, versus a man who thought fucking huge! I think what they had envisioned was a regional franchise, you know something like In-N-Out Burger, but what Ray Kroc wanted was science fiction.”

Dern compared “The Founder,” to another recent release. “One of the things that struck me, similarly to Scorcese’s film “Silence” this year, is that both films held the theme of this other question, which we’ve talking around, which is, is it enough just to know what you’ve accomplished, or do you need the world to know?”

“The Founder” opens nationwide Jan. 20.