Morgan Spurlock, Jeremy Kay writes in the Guardian, "is no journalist; rather, he is a direct activist with a camera who tries to use his platform to engage audiences in an age where the blizzard of technology and information causes people to lose sight of one basic truth." For his first film, Super Size Me, Spurlock suffered irreversible liver damage in order to make his point about the dangers of subjecting himself to a diet of McDonald's products, so it figures that, for his new film — Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, recently premiered at Sundance and due for release later this year — he wouldn't have any hesitations about trying to run down the face of Al Qaeda for an interview. Where in the World had its genesis in Spurlock's detecting, in the wake of the gradual, dawning realization in the country at large that the invasion of Iraq might not have solved all the world's problems and made the United States safer, an upsurge of media interest in bin Laden's continuing existence. Part of the joke of the new movie is that some people actually took its title conceit seriously. "The media blew things way out of proportion before the film came out," says Spurlock, "and made everybody think it was going to be a certain type of movie. The goal was initially to capture Bin Laden, but a friend once told me that if your notion of what your film will be hasn't changed by the time you get to the end, then you didn't listen to anybody. You walk through a door and there are three more that take you in a new direction." While Spurlock was setting up the project, his wife discovered that she was pregnant, a development that caused the film to take on "a whole different meaning. The question becomes: what kind of world am I bringing this kid into? Anybody who's on the verge of becoming a father will know that feeling: you want the world to be a better place."
The prospect of becoming a father didn't keep Spurlock from sauntering, sometimes with hair-raising results, into such hot spots as Afghanistan and the Gaza Strip — "We were scared to death a lot of the time, actually," he admits — though his wife forbid him from visiting Iraq. Spurlock saw part of his mission as illuminating the views and motives of people who are inclined to follow bin Laden, though as he dug deeper and traveled wider, he began to see himself as providing a forum for those in the region who've been shut out, because they don't fit the Western media's preferred stereotypes. "I met so many people who want the same things for themselves and their families that we want. These moderate voices are not represented in the media. All we hear about are the extremists, the terrorists, because it's all about fear and scare tactics. I wanted to give these people a voice."