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Morgan Spurlock Asks Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?
By Fred Topel | Image property of TWC
Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?
Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?
"It was 2005 when we first started talking about what my next movie would be," Spurlock said. "We'd just finished shooting the first season of 30 Days. Supersize 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."
Osama Bin Laden hit close to home for Spurlock. "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?"
After securing a financier in Adam Dell, a personal life event gave the film its heart. "About two months into that process was when we found out Alex 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."
Traveling the middle east, Spurlock spoke to people in the most contentious of countries. The most physically confrontational group were orthodox Jews in Israel. "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."
While the scene may reflect poorly on the aggressors, it does have a happy ending. "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."
Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? opens to theaters on April 18th.
For the trailer and more movie info, go to the Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of TWC
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