Bin There, Done That

Morgan Spurlock talks about his hunt for the world's most wanted man.

by Shaun Brady

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"I expected to go find him," Morgan Spurlock insists, fending off any suggestion that his hunt for the world's most wanted man was a mere pretense. "I had a 50/50 shot, right?"

Despite all of the Hammer-pantsed Osama animations and digitized video-game battles between Spurlock and his quarry that riddle Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, Spurlock and his crew maintained a fairly realistic vision of the shape an actual meeting would take — with their equipment being confiscated, their systems being flushed and progressing through a series of holding spots before reaching their final destination.

"Had we actually gotten to talk to him," he says, "the biggest question for me is would we ever get an honest answer of what could change things? For me, the real question is, how can this all end? How can it stop? How can innocent people stop dying, how can everyone have the ability to have peace and security? And maybe we would have gotten a real answer. It may have just been a whole bunch of crazy."

What he did find came as something of a surprise to the director, who expected to make a film much more about its title character. "I thought that I would go to Afghanistan and Pakistan and uncover a lot more about the real fight and why we haven't caught this guy," says Spurlock. "But as we started going down that path, it organically became much more about the things that push people to follow Bin Laden, the things that inspire people to put somebody like him on a pedestal, that make somebody want to strap on explosives and blow themselves up."

As the film commences, Spurlock justifies the quest as his means to remedy the dangerous world into which he's about to bring a son. His wife's pregnancy is shown in parallel with his jet-setting. But his son's birth may mean a scaling back of the human guinea pig aspect of his films. "Had I had my son, I never would have made a movie like this," he admits. "We were in a lot of dangerous places and who knows what could have happened? My wife has said that my next movie has to be about flowers or fish, something nice. I'm sure it'll be something less dangerous, but hopefully still dealing with a pressing topic."

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? opens Friday at Ritz East. See Shaun Brady's review.