After taking on McDonald's in the star-making documentary Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock had to find another major target. His second film, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden, has Spurlock tracking down the number one terrorist. Spoiler alert: He doesn't find him, but he has fun trying.

---

Crave Online: 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.

Crave Online: 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.

Crave Online: But you're making the films about yourself. That used to be forbidden in pre-Michael Moore docs.

Morgan Spurlock: Post-Supersize 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.

Crave Online: Did you use the 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.

Crave Online: 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?"

Crave Online: So where is Osama Bin Laden?

Morgan Spurlock: 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.

Crave Online: Were you worried he'd be found before you finished post? What would you have called the movie?

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.

Crave Online: 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 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.

Crave Online: Your relationship with Alex has been- -

Morgan Spurlock: Tumultuous?

Crave Online: I was going to say it's 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.

Crave Online: 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.

Crave Online: Supersize Me changed the fast food and health education industries. What change do you hope this film will inspire?

Morgan Spurlock: The greatest thing I think Supersize Me did was empower people. 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." 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. So he saw the movie and he came up to me afterwards, 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 took her 14-year-old son to the film. 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, 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.

Crave Online: 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.

Crave Online: It takes so long to shoot a documentary, 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. Supersize Me was so fast. We got the idea for Supersize Me on Thanksgiving of 2002 and Thanksgiving of 2003, 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.

Crave Online: 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.

Crave Online: 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.

Crave Online: Were you ever on the radar for Homeland Security during this?

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 trenchcoat in a fedora. It's like, "have you seen this guy?" So these pictures got stopped at customers 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."

Crave Online: What's up for 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 [shoveling] 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 Indiana 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.

Crave Online: 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.

Crave Online: What's next film-wise?

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.

Crave Online: Who gave you the confidence to go out and confront big issues?

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. 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.

Crave Online: Will you be like that with your son?

Morgan Spurlock: No, my son's not allowed to do anything. Never allowed to leave the house, he's not allowed to do anything.