Morgan Spurlock, the Super Size Me guy, went on a quest to find the stunningly elusive old man on dialysis in Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? You may make the educated guess that if he had actually FOUND the guy, you would have heard about it by now, and that guess would be right. But he DID get to the most likely location - the mountains of Pakistan - and he recently told us what would happen if he had been found.
If we caught him, we have a big party and I get a big $25 million Tiger Woods golf check! We talked about it, Danny Marracino and myself, and what would happen if we would get to find him or get to speak to him. A lot of people have asked ‘what would you have said, what would you have asked him?’ I think the biggest thing for me is 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?” Maybe we’d have gotten a real answer, maybe something real could have come out of that , you know, with some 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.
That was a concern when we were making the film was “would this guy be caught?” Great, if he was caught, fantastic. That’s an awesome, wonderful thing. You can’t get upset about that. Would it have completely ruined the film we were making at the time? Possibly. It would have thrown a gigantic wrench into the plans. 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. What you start to see is that 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 who get all the air time 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 bites 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.
Where IS Osama bin Laden?
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 and we were in Peshawar, 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 to 75 miles away, guesstimating. Whether he’s still there or has moved on to somewhere else, because I think he’s mobile within that area, personally, who knows? But I think he’s still there somewhere.
What do you hope this film does for people?
There’s a guy who saw the film, a young kid, about 19 or 20, who saw the film at Sundance, who had been wanting to go overseas and 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 he said “I’m going to go get a passport immediately and I’m gonna go. I’m gonna 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, she’s an incredibly astute news person, reads the paper every day and just knows everything that’s happening in the world, and she took her 14-year-old son to the film, who plays in a rock band and plays video games with his friends and has no idea what’s going on outside of his junior high. She said “after this film, he and I sat down and we had a real political discussion and he was excited to talk and he was excited to engage on what he’d seen in this movie,” and she goes “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… there are a lot of people who have tuned out. I think we 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. We’ve lost sight of optimism and hope. So maybe it’ll serve as a bridge.
Why do you insert yourself into your documentaries, which traditionally stress complete objectivity?
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a lot of my politics in this film. I really want people to make up their own minds. I’ll tell you what I’m feeling and what I’m thinking while I’m in this moment of being there, immersed in this journey that 99% of us will never get to go on, meeting people that 99% of us will never get to speak to, being in a situation that 99% of us will never actually experience. What I want to do is try and be honest with you with what I’m feeling, what I’m experiencing while this is going on so that you can feel it, so you can be there with me. As I’m learning, you’re learning. As I’m feeling, you’re feeling. For me, there’s something very exciting about that. I try to be as honest as possible in that moment and not really browbeat you with personal opinions. I think that that’s not the right way to reach as broad an audience as possible.
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. Hopefully, it will be more relatable to you than if you were just watching it an omniscient documentary. Hopefully, in some way, it will become more personal; it will become something more emotional by doing that. At least that’s the goal.
Comments (1)
Morgan Spurlock never ceases to impress me… i just saw Super Size Me, which as amazingly insightful, and now this? well done indeed
Posted by patrick | April 15, 2008 4:18 PM
Posted on April 15, 2008 16:18