erin_broadley

Morgan Spurlock's 2004 documentary Super Size Me made enough waves to provoke the ire of a major corporation, so for his next act, the filmmaker is upping the stakes and taking his rabble-rousing to someone far more villainous than the Hamburglar -- Osama bin Laden. In his new documentary, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, Spurlock leaves his heavily pregnant wife behind and goes on a multi-country odyssey as an average citizen trying to do what the CIA apparently can't -- find out where the terrorist mastermind is actually hiding and slap the cuffs on him. His journey takes him to various points across the Middle East where he meets both friendly, indifferent and not-so friendly locals and tries to answer the big question of our time: Why do they hate us? Back in January, SuicideGirls caught up with Spurlock at the Sundance Film Festival and asked him about his new movie and what he wants to accomplish with it.

Ryan Stewart: I like that video game of you versus bin Laden that appears throughout the film.

Morgan Spurlock: Right on, yeah. The guys who made the video game, it's a company called Curious Pictures in New York and they just did Rock Band, that came out. So those were the guys who did the animation for that.

RS: You should get it into stores. I don't think Osama is going to sue.

MS: Yeah, I don't think he's gonna come after me.

RS: When you first sat down to do this project, did you ever actually think you might catch Osama bin Laden?

MS: Yeah, I mean I went into this thing thinking that we've got as good a shot as anybody. Why not? Why not give it a try? As we got closer and found out more information ... right before we went into Pakistan and when we were getting ready to go into the tribal areas there was a bombing -- they blew up a madrassa and they didn't know if it was Americans that did it, they didn't know if it was the Pakistani military that did it, so things got incredibly hairy up there. It was very bad, very anti-American, anti-Western, so that, compiled with what I'd learned on the whole trip, I just said, "You know what, it's so not worth it to go into this area right now." And my wife was days away from popping so it was time to get back!

RS: And what was the plan if you did catch him? Citizen's arrest?

MS: Yeah, citizen's arrest! Citizen's arrest! I'd call the CIA and say, "I'm right here, he's right here next to me, I'll put him on the phone!" Yeah, I don't know. That's one of those things that you think about and had we actually got to sit down and talk to him, who knows? Probably one thing I'd love to know, to ask him, is how can this all stop? Can this end? How do we make this all end?

RS: You think he wants it to end?

MS: I don't know. That's a good question. I don't know if he does or not and it's a scary thing to think about, that we live in a world where this is just going to continue, possibly forever, but it's not like terrorism's a new thing. It's been going on for centuries and now there's a new phase, a new brand of terrorism, and that's one of the things we talk about in the movie.

RS: Was there ever a moment when you really felt in danger?

MS: I think when we were embedded in the military was probably the scariest. You're at a place where these guys are targets -- they specifically target the military. They target these guys who are out there every day.

RS: Roadside bombs.

MS: Yeah, with IEDs and rocket attacks. We met countless people who had been in TICs -- troops in contact they call it and yeah, it's scary. The FOB [forward operating base] that we were on just the week before was shot with a rocket. There was a rocket attack on the base. You never know, you never know when something can happen and we were really lucky.

RS: The Palestinians are leading the news today with people trying to escape the Gaza strip because of the humanitarian situation. What's your sense of the place?

MS: We didn't get to go into Gaza because at the time Israel was taking out some Hamas headquarters and there were tanks firing on Gaza while at the same time, there are rocket attacks firing on Sderot less than a kilometer away. It's sad. It's a tough situation. I feel for both sides. Both of these peoples deserve to have a homeland that's safe where both of them can call home and my heart goes out to both of them.

RS: Seems like you made a big attempt to be even-handed in every society you went into.

MS: Yeah, I think you just need to present the story. I'm not somebody who likes to tell people what to think. I don't like anybody to tell me what to think, so me with the film, I like people to walk away and make up their own minds.

RS: I would imagine that as a documentarian you come up with a lot of ideas and you have to shelve them because they're not big enough for a feature.

MS: Well, especially for this film ... coming off of Super Size Me, which I didn't expect to resonate with a global audience the way it did, but it ended up showing in like seventy-five countries. It was amazing. So when we started trying to think about what was the next film, I wanted to think about something that didn't just affect an American audience, it would affect a global audience and the war on terror, terrorism, Osama bin Laden, this is a global issue. It's not just something that happens in our own back yard. For me, that was one of the reasons why I kind of wanted to delve into this story.

RS: We do see you walking out of a McDonald's in this film at one point.

MS: Yeah, you can't escape it. Rather than just try to escape it, we just pay a little homage to the movie in there and it was good. People like it.

RS: Who was filming the scenes of your wife's impending delivery while you were off shooting?

MS: We had a great DP, Nadia Hallgren, she also worked on Trouble the Water, which is here. She's really, really a gifted shooter and she was recommended by our DP, Daniel Marracino and it was one of those things where I would talk to her and we'd let her know that I'm getting ready to call Alex, or you know, make sure to be there at this time and I'll call her. So she was there a lot of the time. She would just follow Alex around as Alex was going about her daily life, going to doctor's appointments, going to meet her midwife, going to yoga as we see in the movie. Alex was trying to remain calm through the whole thing and I was really trying to not tell her anything that was going on. I'd call her from Afghanistan and be like, "Everything's great! We're hanging out with some Army guys, we're just hanging out on the base, nothing's going on," cause I didn't want her to worry.

RS: And did you make it back just in time?

MS: I made it back just a few weeks before go-time.

RS: Do you expect young people to respond to this film?

MS: Yeah, I tried to make a film that would appeal to a lot of people. I was stopped the other night by a guy, he looked about my dad's age so I'm guessing 55-60, and he came up to me and said, "I love the film, the music, the animation, everything and it says exactly what I've wanted to hear for the last four years." This was an older guy and I was so taken aback. For me to make something that appeals to somebody of his generation is awesome. Somebody from my generation, kids who grew up in the '80s and all the way to today, the MTV generation of people who, like me, are also having kids, [it's for them.] I think it's for people who have families, I think it's for younger adults, I think it will hopefully appeal to a lot of people.

RS: People who want practical solutions to these issues.

MS: Yeah. Some people are like, "You don't really hear anything new [in the film]," or "I heard about that," and for a lot of people it might be like that if you're very well-read or if you watch a lot of news, but a lot of people don't. It's hard to listen to stuff that's really sad and depressing so we start to tune out and turn it off and not read about it. So a lot of what we talk about in the movie will be incredibly new to a big audience because it doesn't get talked about in the everyday media.

RS: Was there stuff that you shot and then left out for one reason or another?

MS: There's so much stuff that we shot ... it's an incredible amount of material. A thousand hours of footage went into this movie. About 940 hours of real field footage and about 60 hours of archival footage, so yeah, you have to make really hard choices in a movie of this scope. You want it to have this big, grandiose feel as you're going on this global journey, going to find Osama bin Laden, but at the same time you have to keep a very coherent storyline. You don't want it to suddenly get boring, and just be talking heads or have things that feel tangential to the actual story. It has to be tight.

RS: Is bin Laden still relevant?

MS: I think he's relevant because of what he's become. What he's become is this very big, mythical individual. He's like Keyser Soze, everywhere and nowhere, the kind of person people whisper about in dark rooms. He still puts fear in the hearts of men. That's what he is, and I think when you travel around, and you see, as the woman in Pakistan said, "I don't know if he's here, but his influence is," I think that's a very telling thing. You start to see that in all these countries we went to. There are elements and pieces of idealogies that do come from Osama bin Laden everywhere we went.

RS: You must have met lots of people like that one guy who said, "Fuck bin Laden and fuck America too." People are just tired of it.

MS: People are tired. People outside the village in Afghanistan were like, "We're not the Taliban's friend or your friend. We just want to live a peaceful life." That's hard to hear as an American. It's hard to hear a lot of anti-American sentiment. They're saying this and they're opening up their homes to me and saying, "You're a good person and I'm sure your country is filled with good people, but they have to understand the actions that have been taken by your government." To hear that is a hard thing to swallow. It's hard to listen, but I think we should all be encouraged to listen.

RS: So how do you find the atmosphere for documentarians these days?

MS: It's been a tough year for docs. There are so many movies coming into the marketplace right now, that I think it's hard for a lot of docs to compete. And docs don't get a lot of screentime, you know? Michael Moore just had this big initiative, this big press conference, saying that one of his big goals was to get theater owners to dedicate at least one screen in a multiplex to documentary or foreign films. If something like that could happen, it would be great. The way it is now, it's not even a week. Four or five days. If your movie doesn't make X amount of dollars per screen, you're out. They get rid of it. They don't even give it a chance to find an audience, so its' really difficult.

We released a movie before Christmas that we basically self-released. We put out a movie called What Would Jesus Buy? about the commercialization of Christmas. It played in about 40 markets but it didn't even break three hundred grand. We were competing with the movies qualifying for the Academy awards. When you're a documentary and you're coming out against Michael Clayton and Juno and these big movies, you're number three or four on somebody's movie list on a Friday night. You're not number one, and how many people go see two or three movies a week, apart from some cinephile like you and I who live for movies? Most people won't.


RS: Is it unfair to house them in the same multiplex environment as Spiderman?

MS: I don't think it's unfair, because I think there's a way. When Super Size Me opened, a friend of mine went into a theater in Dallas, Texas and he goes, "I had to call you because this is the greatest thing I've ever seen. Playing in this theater is Troy, Van Helsing and Super Size Me. I said, "That's awesome", and he said, "Brad Pitt, Hugh Jackman and you." And I said, "What, and my movie theater is completely empty?" And he said, "No, it's packed. You don't understand, it's filled with teenage kids who came to see the movie." And that was a great thing to have happen. When I was a kid growing up, and you'd go to the movies and what you want to see is sold out, I would see whatever was playing. Part of it was a social environment with my friends and part of it was because I love movies. So if you can get movies like that into a giant multiplex, rather than showing five Harry Potter films or Star Wars on seven screens, one of those could be dedicated to something a little different.

RS: You mentioned Michael Moore earlier. Do you see yourself as more of a consumer advocate than a political advocate?

MS: Yeah, I think this movie affects everybody and I think the film deals with a lot of political issues but I don't think it feels like a political movie. I don't like beating people over the head. I try to make people laugh and make people think. On our TV show 30 Days and especially with the film we produced, What Would Jesus Buy?, we deal with a lot of consumer-related issues. I have no idea what the response will be from this movie, but people seem to like it.

RS: What's next?

MS: We just finished season three of 30 Days and we're putting the finishing touches on that and it will come out later in the spring and this movie will be released in April, so I'm going to spend some time with my family. Maybe in May or June I'll start thinking about another movie.



Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? is in theaters now. For more information, check out the official site.