Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock cut his teeth in reality television, creating and co-hosting the MTV show I Bet You Will, which challenged people to do disgusting or embarrassing things for money. Spurlock's winning personality and gift for big conceptual hooks paid off in his breakout 2004 documentary Super Size Me, in which his observations about the fast-food industry were hung on a personal experiment to eat every meal at McDonald's for a month. Shortly before the film was released, McDonald's removed the "super-size" option from its menus, but the company claims that the timing was coincidental. After Super Size Me, Spurlock adopted a similar conceit for the FX show 30 Days, an activist entertainment that stages various monthlong social experiments, including episodes where Spurlock tried to live on minimum wage for a month, and spent 25 days in jail.
In his latest film, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?, Spurlock heads off to the Middle East in search of the world's most wanted man, and comes home with insights on the region, plus a wealth of provocative material. Spurlock recently spoke with The A.V. Club about the journey, the conclusions he reached, and his Mary Poppins school of filmmaking.
The A.V. Club: The film starts with the premise that you're about to be a father, and you want the world safe for your child, so you seek out the world's most wanted man. Half that premise seems tongue-in-cheek, and half is real. How do you want the audience to take it?
Morgan Spurlock: Hopefully, they take it just like you did. Hopefully, they take it as tongue-in-cheek and also real, in that I'm going on this journey, and that I really do want the world to be a safer place for my kid. The whole idea that a documentary filmmaker is going to go off and find the most wanted man in the world, that everybody else in the military and government can't find, is in itself a bit of a lark. But why not make the attempt? I think that the fun part is going on the journey with me.
AVC: Of course, some people believe they don't want to find Osama, so maybe you had a shot.
MS: "Spurlock knows where he is! He's in Spurlock's house!" [Laughs.] Yeah, he's back at my house in Brooklyn. He's just chilling out.
AVC: How did the arrangements for this journey come together? It isn't something a travel agent can put together.
MS: [Laughs.] Yeah, exactly. It's not something that Orbitz knocked out for us. It was hard. The logistics of a movie like this are massive. We had a great production team in New York. My co-producer, Jeremy Chilnick—who also was my co-writer on the movie—and [producer] Stacey Offman did a great job of helping us put this whole thing together. You throw a lot of stuff out there, the people you want to talk to and the places you want to go, and you never really know how it's going to play out.
I don't go into a movie with preconceived notions of where I want things to go. We cast a really wide net and started to whittle it down in post [production]. We were really fortunate; in every country we went to, we hired amazing people on the ground, like local producers and fixers, journalists as well. All of these countries kind of helped us navigate the waters, and helped us find the people we wanted to talk to. In those situations, you can never predict what's going to happen. You talk to one person, and that one person is like: "Oh, you know who you need to talk to? You should go meet this guy." One by one, the other doors start to open for you on the ground, and your ideas of who you want to talk to are thrown out the window.
AVC: How did you get the Saudis to let you speak with those high-school students, even under those restrictive conditions?
MS: We basically went to the school and just asked, "We'd like to speak to some students." Our fixer contacted the school, and the principal said, "Sure, you can talk to a couple of our kids. I'll pick the kids." He picked those two children and said, "We have to be there to watch." It was great that they allowed us in, but kind of a bummer that they had to shut down the interview.
AVC: What was in it for them?
MS: Well, I think it's just perception. They want also to improve the perception that people have of Saudi Arabia, but I think shutting down the interview probably isn't the best way to do that.
AVC: How did you get embedded in the military unit that deep into Afghanistan?
MS: That's hard. We were denied embed from the United States. We kept applying to the Department Of Defense and kept saying, "We're going over. We want to do an embed with the military over there." And they were like, "No. No. No." So finally we just resolved, "We're just going to go to Afghanistan, and when we get there, we'll ask them." When we got there, we went to the International Security Assistance Force headquarters. ISAF isn't controlled by the United States government. It's working independently. We go to their headquarters and say, "We'd like to get an embed," and they're like, "Oh, sure! Just fill out this form, and how soon do you want to go?" [Laughs.] In a matter of days, we were basically embedded with the troops.
AVC: Did your presumed political point of view ever get in the way of making any of these arrangements?
MS: I don't think so. I mean, I'm a registered independent, so my political views are kind of not in line with a lot of other cats. I think the biggest thing I wanted to do was just kind of let other people tell their stories. Kind of open up their world to us, and we'd listen. I think that's one of the biggest goals I had in making this movie, was listening to what other people had to say.
AVC: Did you learn anything in the Middle East that altered your preconceptions?
MS: I think that what we are fed every day, especially in the two-minute sound bites that you get in the news, is a very specific version of the Middle East. What you see, the majority of it is people who are screaming and yelling. "If it bleeds, it leads." That's the selling point of television news. I went in with preconceived notions that people weren't going to be willing to talk to us, that people weren't going to be hospitable, that we were going to have a lot more hostility toward us, and that really wasn't the case. Once we got there on the ground, people were more than willing to talk to us, and opened up their homes, and invited us in to sit down, and explained how they felt. They were excited that they actually had the ability to speak to somebody, because these are the silent majority. These are the people you don't get to hear from. For me, it really became a goal as we started to get out on the road, to talk to people like that.
AVC: That becomes the thesis of the film, in a way. The idea that this silent, more moderate majority is really a force that is going to keep these extreme warring elements isolated.
MS: Yeah, and that's what you want. The more we can empower people like that, and the more we can give face time to people like that, the more power you take away from the others. I think you need to empower those people that can really quell the other types of folks.
AVC: One criticism that's been leveled at your work is that you know the destination before you take the journey. You know you're going to get sick if you eat fast food for a month. You're probably not going to catch Osama bin Laden.
MS: Those are pretty broad endings. [Laughs.]
AVC: So how would you respond to that? Did you have ideas on how this particular film was going to end?
MS: People have said this particular film is oversimplified, or people have said that I knew where I was going. The only thing I knew is that I was hopefully going to come home, and my wife was going to have a baby. That was the only thing that I really knew was going to happen. We didn't know how things were going to end up as we traveled overseas, and we didn't know where we were going to go once we hit the ground. We didn't know what we were going to find out, or the people we were going to meet. That was all incredibly natural and organic, and you can't plan those things. In terms of knowing what the bookends were, my wife was pregnant, but we didn't know if we were going to include that in the movie. While that was what shifted the focus of the movie for me, how much of that was going to make the final product, you don't know until you're in the editing room. I'm not somebody who comes in with a whole outline, and says, "Here's the movie we're going to make." That's not what a documentary is for me. I think a documentary is about capturing events as they unfold in real time. People have said, also, that the film is an oversimplification of things. That it really boils things down and makes them too simple. My response is, "Well, if you haven't heard, fast food is also bad for you." [Laughs.] I think that Super Size Me made things very simple, but at the same time, made things accessible. I think this film does that as well. I think Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? is a great primer to a larger conversation. That all the pieces we touch on over the course of this great journey are great jumping-off points for a larger discussion, and for a larger investigation for whoever sees the movie.
AVC: Do you feel like people need that primer?
MS: I feel like some people do. Again, look at Super Size Me. This is a very simple idea. Of course everyone knows that fast food's bad for you. It's exploring this topic in a much different way, that I think gets into different pieces of the puzzle. That is new to people. I think this movie's also very new. I think it will reach audiences in a different way, without tasting like medicine, without tasting like spinach. It makes this topic that we've heard and read so much about accessible in a different way. A lot of people have checked out. We are incredibly apathetic and complacent. We don't read the newspaper every day. We don't watch the news every day. We don't want to hear about these things. This is a chance to kind of bring things back into the forefront in a new way.
AVC: So people need a hook, in other words?
MS: I think that my movies are entertaining. This is a fun movie. At the same time, it doesn't taste like medicine. It is the Mary Poppins school of filmmaking: a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. There's terrible news in there, but it tastes kind of like cherry.
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