Morgan Spurlock Interview

MoviesOnline caught up this week with documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock at the Los Angeles press day to talk about his new film, “Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?”

If Spurlock has learned anything from over 30 years of movie-watching, it’s that if the world needs saving, it’s best done by one lonely guy, willing to face danger head on, and take it down, action hero style. In “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?,” the Oscar nominated filmmaker takes on a franchise even more lethal than McDonald’s—Al Qaeda. And after this real life action thriller is over, the world may never be the same.

So, with no military experience, knowledge or expertise, he sets off to do what the CIA, FBI and U.S. military have all failed to do: find the world’s most wanted man. Why take on such a seemingly impossible mission? Simple—he wants to make the world safe for his soon to be born child. But before he finds bin Laden, he first needs to learn where he came from and the environment and influences that shaped him. 

Following bin Laden’s trail through some of the most dangerous places in the world, Spurlock encounters both the rational and the radical faces of the Middle East. He interviews many people who embrace him on the streets and welcome him into their homes, often experiencing their cultures in ways that sharply contrast with the conventional media images of the region. Spurlock finds they’re not that different from American families, sharing the same hopes and fears for their children that he has for his own.

“Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?” goes beyond shedding light on the one man that has shaped the world’s perception of a region and its people. Spurlock risks life and limb to uncover the truth about bin Laden, and in doing so explores the lines that divide, those that unite, and the countless shades of grey between. 

Spurlock is the writer/producer/director of the Academy Award nominated feature length documentary film “Super Size Me” which was named to more than 35 “Top Ten” lists in 2004 and is currently the 8th highest grossing documentary of all time. The film was also awarded the inaugural Writers Guild of America Documentary Screenplay Award, and the Best Director Prizes at the Sundance and Edinburgh Film Festivals.

Spurlock just finished filming the third season of his highly acclaimed F/X original series “30 days” which examines social issues in America by immersing individuals in a life that requires them to “see the world through another’s eyes.” In 2006, the series was nominated for a Producer’s Guild Award and won a GLAAD Media Award for Best Non-Fiction Television Series. Also, this year, “30 Days” was nominated for an IDM (International Documentary Association) award in the category of Best Continuing Documentary Series.

Morgan Spurlock is an interesting and engaging person and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us about his new movie:

MoviesOnline: So where in the world is Osama Bin Laden?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: [Laughs] He's up in my hotel room. He's just hanging out getting room service. I think he's still in the mountains of Waziristan or somewhere in that area. When we got to the end of our trip, when we were in Pakistan, people were pointing to a direction up in those mountains that I think, by the time we got to the border, was probably about 50-75 miles away, guestimating. Whether he's still there or has moved on to somewhere else, because I think he's mobile within that area personally. Who knows? I think he's still there, somewhere.

MoviesOnline: How proprietary are the Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego people about their title?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: Well, Rockapella hasn't called so I guess it's all right. They haven't come out. No, I think there was somebody else that had, even before Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, had a Where in the World is Somebody, so for me it was just following a couple different things.

MoviesOnline: Did you have an ending for if you'd caught him?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: Where if we caught him, we had a big party and I get a big $25 million Tiger Woods golf check? We talked about it, Danny Marracino and myself, what would happen if we actually would get to find him or get to speak to him. A lot of people have asked what would you have said to him or what would you have asked him. I think the biggest thing for me would have been, I would have liked to have heard from him, "How does it end? How does this stop? How can the killing of innocent people end? How can all the hatred end? How can it just get to the point where there's peace and security for everybody?" And maybe gotten a real answer. Maybe something real would have come out of that, with actual steps. Or, we might have just gotten a whole lot of crazy. Who knows? We would have gotten an answer. That would have been interesting.

MoviesOnline: Where did the idea for this film come from?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: It was 2005 when we first started talking about what my next movie would be. We'd just finished shooting the first season of 30 Days. Super Size Me did something that none of us anticipated which was play in about 75 countries around the world. It kind of went so beyond our borders. It was something I didn't anticipate and the way that it did that made me realize that my next movie I wanted to be something that dealt with something that was much more of a global issue, on a global scale and wasn't just an American issue, of which this was. I live in New York City so this question is constantly out there. I was there on 9/11 so this is something that's brought up consistently. Bush had just been elected to his second term and Osama had released a tape and suddenly the tape was everywhere. It was on every news channel, every radio station, people were talking about him again. He was completely ubiquitous. Newscasters were like, "Where is Osama? Where is he? Why haven't we found him? Why haven't we brought this man to justice? Where in the world is Osama Bin Laden?" And I said, "That's a great question. I'd like to know that as well." We started just formulating how would we even make a movie like this. How would we start going about trying to find those answers or tackle this topic? We raised a little bit of money to do some preproduction on the movie from a guy named Adam Dell. I was out one night and he said, "I just met with your lawyer about a movie that I'd like to make. I'd like to try and go find Osama Bin Laden." I said, "You and I should sit down and talk immediately." So he helped us raise the first bit of seed money just to even formulate an idea around this film. About two months into that process was when we found out Alex (Jamieson) was pregnant. At that point, the film took a real shift for me personally. It really went away from just being where in the world is Osama Bin Laden and what kind of world creates an Osama Bin Laden to also, what kind of world am I about to bring a kid into? I think that kind of shift made it much more personal for me and I think ultimately made the journey that we went on and the people that we went to talk to in addition to politicians and people in the military, ultimately made the film better.

MoviesOnline: Were you worried he'd be found before you finished post production?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: They Found Osama Bin Laden. We Found Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden. No, that was a concern while we were making the film was would this guy be caught. And great. If he was caught, fantastic. That’s an awesome, wonderful thing. You can't be upset about that. Would it have completely ruined the film that we were making at the time? Possibly. It would have thrown a gigantic wrench into the plans but we would have figured that out somehow. Even if they would have found him, I think a lot of the things people talk about over the course of the movie would remain the same because what you start to see over the course of the movie is, as much as Osama Bin Laden isn't in Egypt or Morocco or Saudi Arabia or the Palestinian territories or Afghanistan or Pakistan, he is in all of those places. The spirit of Osama Bin Laden, his ideology, the way that he thinks has infiltrated these countries, especially people who are in that minority of people that get all the airtime here in the United States. I think what the film does a really good job of doing is starting to give a voice to that silent majority, the people that I think we don't give enough airtime to in America. I think the film does a great job of getting out of the two minute sound bytes that we get on the news and painting a much different portrait of what life is like in the Middle East for a lot of these people on a daily basis.

MoviesOnline: How much of an eye opener was it to see how America is perceived?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: I think they don't like America's foreign policy as much as they used to. I think people still have a tremendous amount of hope in what America means and what America is. America is a dream and an ideology and a hope that things can always be better. That's how a lot of people see the United States still. I think that a lot of that has been shattered over the course of, for some people it's been five years, some it's been 10-15 years, but as you heard consistently and we spoke to people consistently, it was, "We don't hate the American people but we hate what's happened to the American government and what's transpired." I think we're still taught that people hate us and it's this "They hate us," them, those people and everybody's grouped into this one thing. Islam is a monolithic thing. Those people are a monolithic thing and that's just not the case. We like things to be very simple and in a little package and I think it's much more broad than that. I think over the course of the film, even when I go in my travels, you see that from different places where we go, from all the countries we go to, there's a much more diverse, even brand of Islam in all of these countries and how it's practiced. For me, I personally also thought that I was going to be met with a lot more hostility, a lot more resentment, that people weren't going to want to talk to me because I was an American. They weren't going to want to sit down and open up. It was completely the opposite. People really were eager to sit down and share their feelings and share their outlooks and share their opinions. These are people who don't get to speak in a lot of these countries. These people live in countries where if you speak out, you'll go to jail. That's terrible, so I think for them to be able to sit down with somebody from what they see as the Western media and actually being able to express their thoughts, knowing it could potentially reach people back in America is very brave.

MoviesOnline: Your relationship with Alex has been- -

MORGAN SPURLOCK: Tumultuous?

MoviesOnline: Very integral to your films. How short a leash are you on for your next one?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: About this long. I'm on a leash about that long. She's already told me my next film should be about how to make your wife really happy. I don't know if I know how to make a movie like that. I'm working on it. I'm trying to make it up to her every day.

MoviesOnline: Your work is about doing something a little dangerous to your health or going out there?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: The next one I'm going to try not to do that. I'm going to try not to make it so dangerous for me.

MoviesOnline: What about the hostile confrontation you encountered in Israel?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: Well, it's surprising. The biggest thing is we all couldn't believe what happened. What's interesting, I'll tell you a couple things about that scene. Our producer, the guy we were working with there, who had gone and interviewed people within the orthodox neighborhood before and it's fine. He's like, "Don't worry about it." So we go in there and we're shooting with a big giant HD hi-def camera which I'm sure concerned them, and we're asking political questions that I'm sure they didn't like. A couple people started to get upset. It wasn't a lot. It was probably five or six people out of the hundreds that you see by the end that were watching that were getting upset. For me, the greatest thing that comes out of that scene is the guy who comes up to me and makes it a point to come up to me and say, "Listen, what you see here, the majority of us don't think like them. These few people that are really getting aggressive and angry and being very loud, this very small group of people in this entire neighborhood, we're not like them." He was really concerned about perception. How am I going to be perceived because of what these people are doing? I think there's a fantastic parallel to that with all the people that we meet over the course of this film, which is also perception. "Don't group us into these people who do awful things. That's not who we are. That's not what we believe." For me, I found that to be really beautiful.

MoviesOnline: What change do you hope this film will inspire, as Super Size Me did?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: It wasn't like we went to do Super Size Me to say, "We're going to make a movie that's going to change everything!" That's really not the goal when I go in to make a film. For me, the biggest thing is to make a good movie, to make something that I'm passionate about that somehow speaks to me as a filmmaker. With this movie, there've been a couple things. The greatest thing I think Super Size Me did was empower people. It empowered an individual. As much as it made McDonald's or other corporations look at how they do business, it made individuals look at the choices they make. I get stopped all the time by mothers who say, "Ever since we saw your film, we sit down and have dinner every night as a family." I see schools that talk about how they changed their school lunch program as a result of this. I was stopped by a guy at the airport a week ago in Chicago when I was there doing press for the movie who stopped me as I was getting ready to go through the checkpoint where you're putting all your stuff in bins. He said, "I told myself if I ever saw you in person, I'd have to thank you. I just want to show you something." He reaches in his pocket and he pulls out a picture of himself 150 pounds ago. He goes, "Ever since I've seen your movie, I've lost 150 pounds and I just want to say thank you." It's amazing, and this was just a regular guy on his way home from a trip he was on. So there've been a couple things that have happened from people that have seen this movie at different screenings. There was a guy who saw the film, a young kid, about 19 or 20, saw the film at Sundance who had been wanting to go overseas and had been wanting to travel but he's afraid, he's scared. He goes, "I don't know what's out there. I don't know what people are going to think of me. Once you leave America, you're not safe." So he saw the movie and he came up to me afterwards and said, "I just want to let you know…" and he told me what I just told you, and he said, "I'm going to go get a passport immediately and I'm going to go because I'm going to go see what's out there for myself." I thought that was fantastic. If it makes somebody want to go see on their own, to learn on their own, to meet people on their own, that's great. There was a woman who lives in New York City that came to a screening who is an incredibly astute news person and reads the paper every day and watches television and just knows everything that's happening in the world. She took her 14-year-old son to the film who plays in a rock band and plays videogames with his friends and has no idea what's going on outside his junior high. She said, "After this film, he and I sat down and had a real political discussion. He was excited to talk and he was excited to just engage on just what he'd seen in this movie. That was the first time he and I had ever had a discussion like that and it was incredible." So if this film can serve as a primer to a larger discussion between people who will have said, "Well, I know most of this," but there's a lot of people whether it's their children or friends or neighbors or other people who have tuned out, I think we also live in a country where a lot of us have become complacent and apathetic and we've shut down because there's been so much bad news that we've kind of lost site of optimism and hope. Maybe it'll serve as a bridge.

MoviesOnline: Were you on the radar for Homeland Security?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: I don't know. Maybe this room's bugged right now. I have no clue. Some FBI folks came by our office. We'd sent some pictures over to Morocco when we were going to go do some pickup shooting. We had photographs of Osama Bin Laden in countries we went to, different places where we went. Then we had him in Casablanca dressed up as Humphrey Bogart wearing a trench coat and a fedora. It's like, "Have you seen this guy?" So these pictures got stopped at customs and when our producer, our local fixer went to pick them up, basically he got picked up and taken to jail and they were like, "Why do you have these pictures? What is this all about?" So we're calling their government, it's like, "You've got to let him go." So the FBI comes to our office and they say, "We'd like to ask you about some photographs." So we show them, "Were they these?" He goes, "Yes, they were those pictures. Why do you have those?" I said, "Well, we're making a movie." He said, "What's the film about." I said, "It's about Osama Bin Laden." "Why are you making a film about Osama Bin Laden?" "Well, I'm looking for Osama Bin Laden." "Why are you looking for Osama Bin Laden?" I said, "Why aren't you looking for Osama Bin Laden?" "Mr. Spurlock, you have a good day."

MoviesOnline: What was it like shooting in Saudi Arabia?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: Shooting in Saudi Arabia is incredible because it really is a country that is…. There is a façade of one side where here is this incredibly conservative country that at the same time is fighting against itself and its conservatism, is fighting against religious conservatism, is fighting against Westernization, modernization, Americanization. You know there are malls everywhere. There are fast food restaurants everywhere. The street where the kids cruise on Friday nights, where they drive up and down the street, is bookended on each end by a McDonalds and a Chilis and that’s the U-turn where they turn up and go back down the street. There are so many things which we couldn’t put in there in Saudi Arabia which I talk about in the book that comes out tomorrow but there’s this huge underground scene and underground party scene and underground drug scene and an underground gay scene. It’s like all this stuff is there, it’s just that everything is behind closed doors. Nothing is talked about. For me, it was a fascinating place to see and even just as you go from Riyadh to Jeddah, where Riyadh is even more conservative than Jeddah, we’re in the supermarket in Jeddah and women don’t even wear the hijab. There are women that won’t cover their hair but they’ll wear the abaya. And in Riyadh almost all the women will wear the hijab and the face veil. It’s an interesting place.

MoviesOnline: What about the impact of showing the film in countries like that?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: Well, in Saudi Arabia where there's no movie theaters and there's no movies, there are so many movies. The movie premieres here this Friday. My prediction is by Saturday, it'll be everywhere in Saudi Arabia, on the black market, on the web somewhere. The bootleg will be out and the bootleg will be out fast. I'm anxious to start getting feedback.

MoviesOnline: Have you replaced Michael Moore as the everyman documentary hero?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: I don't know. I'm just trying to make movies that hopefully people like, and that I like.

MoviesOnline: To follow up, you do insert yourself in the documentary. What about that school of thought to be part of the film?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: Post-Super Size Me, and it even more became evident to me when we were making 30 Days and I did the episode where my wife and I lived on minimum wage and then I was locked up in prison. For me, there's something really interesting and exciting about giving you insight into a world where I take you with me. It's not just like you're watching other people live. Hopefully, you and I start to build a trust with each other and a relationship with each other so that when I'm going on this trip, it's almost like someone you know is going there and you want to see this person that you know go to these places or experience something that you won't get to. Then I'm telling you the story of what's happening over the course of this unfolding. Hopefully it will be more relatable to you than if you were just watching it in an omniscient documentary. I think hopefully it will in some way become more personal. It will become something I think more emotional by doing that. At least that's the goal for me of what I've tried to do from 30 Days now into this film.

MoviesOnline: Did you use video game animation to reach this generation?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: Trying to reach me. That's my generation. I'm a child of the video game generation. I grew up with Pong in my house and then an Atari 2600. Then my friends got an Intellevision and then I got a Colecovision. Then another friend of mine got an Atari 5200 and then I went to school and got a Nintendo. Then another friend of mine got a Sega and then I got a Playstation. Then I got a Playstation 2 and then a Playstation 3. Last week I just bought myself a PSP before I went on the road for my press junket tour. I think video games are fantastic and I think they do touch people from my generation, which is just under 40 and all the way down to kids now who are 10 and some even younger. There was a part of that for me that I wanted to really help this be a way to push the story along and push the narrative along in a way that would be engaging and interesting and relatable to a lot of us. To think, if you're that demographic of 10 to 40 is kind of the video game sweet spot, that's a lot of people.

MoviesOnline: When does the game come out?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: That's the question. Weinstein asked the same question. They were like, "Hey, when can we make this game?"

MoviesOnline: How do people react when you go into a McDonald's now?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: I don't go into McDonald's now so they don't react. People might see me walk past a McDonald's but I never go in.

MoviesOnline: It takes so long to shoot a documentary film, do you worry about career momentum?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: Well, with this one too, we were fortunate that over the course of making this film, we got to do two seasons of 30 Days. We actually were finishing the third season while we were in post on the movie. People are like, "Well, it's been four years since your last film." It's not like I've just been sitting around doing nothing. We've produced a couple films. We produced the film What Would Jesus Buy that came out last Christmas, it's coming out on DVD. I've been trying to do what I can to do some different things outside of just making films, but I find films to be so gratifying, and it does take a long time to make one. Super Size Me was so fast. We got the idea for Super Size Me on Thanksgiving of 2002 and the day after Thanksgiving 2003 we got the call that we got into Sundance. That was beyond fast, from concept to delivery in a year. This film, we first started talking about in 2005, started raising money for it in 2006, shooting it 2006, editing throughout 2007, now it's 2008. So that's three years almost for that film. That's a little more where a lot of documentarians live. Steve James, it takes him six, seven years to make a movie. I had lunch with Steve James when I was in Texas for South by Southwest. He goes, "How long did your movie take?" I said three years and he goes, "Oh, a short one." That’s a small one for him.

MoviesOnline: Do you have a sense of stardom or celebrity now?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: I feel very fortunate that I can get to do what I do. I feel like the luckiest guy in the world to get to make films and make things that I'm passionate about and care about. People see me and they're very nice, like the guy I saw at the airport or a parent I run into on the street. Still, I'm a documentary filmmaker, so I can have a life. It's not like I'm Tom Cruise and can't walk outside or Britney Spears where she shut down the 405 when she ran into somebody this weekend. I can still function which is great.

MoviesOnline: But we do know you had a water birth. That's personal.

MORGAN SPURLOCK: I did have a water birth. That's a little personal, but it was nice.

MoviesOnline: What about the new season of 30 Days?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: This season's great. I went back to my home state of West Virginia. In the season premiere, I go underground and become a coal miner, an underground coal miner for 30 days. I get my apprentice coal miner's license and basically become an underground coal miner for a month. It's one of those things, we don't think about those guys. We have no idea or concept of what they go through and it's backbreaking work. It's the hardest job I've ever done in my life. Basically, they do it every day just so you and I can turn on a light bulb. 50% of our electricity still comes from coal and we don't think about it. We don't think about that there's somebody down there doing this [mining] just so we can turn that on or plug in our phone or turn on our tape recorder. That's one episode. There's a great episode about gay parenting. There's an incredible episode about life on an Indian reservation where I go live on the Navajo reservation for 30 days. We do an episode about gun control where a woman whose friend was killed by a stray bullet in Massachusetts moves to Ohio and moves in with a pro-gun family. She actually gets a job in a gun shop. We have a former NFL superstar who lives in a wheelchair for 30 days to see what it's like to be handicapped in the United States, a guy named Ray Crockett who lives in Dallas, Texas. Probably my favorite episode of the year is a hunter from North Carolina. I grew up a hunter, hunting in West Virginia. So this hunter from North Carolina moves to Los Angeles and moves in with an animal rights PETA family for 30 days. It is probably one of the greatest hours of television I've ever seen in my life. It's fantastic. It's such a good show.

MoviesOnline: That had to hit close to home married to a Vegan?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: That's right. Believe me, he was hitting right in my sweet spot on that show. It was so good.

MoviesOnline: Was there a point that you knew nobody was close to finding Osama, you didn't have to worry?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: Yeah, personally I figured it had been so long and they hadn't found him and hadn't caught him that the chances of them finding him before we finished the film, odds were in our favor. It was the calculated risk that we took. As I said, had they found him, it would have been fantastic, but they didn't and hopefully they do.

MoviesOnline: 30 Days starts again June 3 on FX?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: They're a fantastic network to work for. They've been just so gracious. I've never had an experience where they really just gave us such free reign. We go to them with ideas and they're incredibly supportive and just helpful and nurturing with talent. I use that term loosely for myself. We were very blessed to get to have the show there.

MoviesOnline: What's next?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: I got approached to direct one of the segments for Freakonomics which they're adapting into a feature length film. Now there's going to be five or six segments directed by other documentarians that I have so much respect for like Laura Poitras who did My Country, My Country, the girls who did Jesus Camp, Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki who I think are just two incredibly brilliant filmmakers, so for me to be in that group would be an honor. Hopefully that will work out.

MoviesOnline: Who gave you confidence to pursue your dream?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: It was my parents. I think it was both my parents. Both my mother and father were incredibly supportive and just really nurtured me and my brothers to do the things we wanted to do, to go after the things we wanted to do. There were a lot of things that they taught us. The biggest one, we could start anything we wanted to but we could never quit anything. You had to see things through. You couldn't give up. You couldn't stop. You had to see it through to the end, good, bad, ugly or otherwise. I think they were just really- - they were never people to tell us that you can't do something or you shouldn't do something. They were really just great, supportive people and they still are. I'm really fortunate.

MoviesOnline: You'll be like that with yours?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: [Laughs] No, my son's not allowed to do anything. Never allowed to leave the house, he's not allowed to do anything.

MoviesOnline: What’s the greatest gift of fatherhood?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: I think suddenly you're not the most important person in the world anymore. You realize, "Wow, it's really not about me at all. It's all about this little guy." Suddenly, that's where all your hope and dreams and reality lies, making sure that he has everything he could possibly want.

MoviesOnline: But he'll be locked up?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: [Laughs] I know, well, he'll have everything he wants in a room. A very small room.

MoviesOnline: Have you researched the issue of vaccines?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: He hasn't been vaccinated. Our son has not. It's something my wife and I talk about consistently. We're about to start traveling to promote the film internationally and I'm taking them with me, so this is a daily conversation she and I have about do we really need to do this. What does he have to have or what should he have when we go to certain places? But he's not been vaccinated. He was breastfed like a champ and has an immune system like nobody's business and he's this big little massive Bam Bam of a vegan baby. So I think that's a bridge we'll have to continue to cross. You can't even send your kid to public school now without them being vaccinated in most school districts in the United States. I think in California you can claim religious beliefs and get out of vaccinations. In a lot of states I think you can do that but if you get one, then they say you have to go through the whole gamut of getting all, however many there are, which I don't agree with. I think once again we've been sold and bought a bill of goods that I don't know if that's the best thing to have.

MoviesOnline: Would you consider it as a film?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: Maybe. We'll see. My kid, at some point, is also going to be going to school and I'd love to make a movie about the public school system in the United States. My mother was a teacher. All my aunts were teachers. I grew up in a family filled with educators. My wife's father is a principal. I'm surrounded by people who love that profession and have seen it change dramatically in their lifetime. I think there's a good story there, we'll see.

MoviesOnline: How old is he now?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: 16 months.

MoviesOnline: Was there a point you thought you really might find Osama?

MORGAN SPURLOCK: That was the plan in the beginning. The plan was, "Come on, we've got as good a shot as anybody else. Why not?"

“Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden” opens in theaters on April 18th.