“I’m not gay, but my mustache is
flaming,” said Morgan Spurlock upon receiving a
2006 GLAAD Media Award for an episode of his F/X reality
series 30 Days -- and his career’s been
equally red-hot since his 2004 Oscar-nominated documentary
Super Size Me, in which he jeopardized his
health by exclusively eating McDonald’s for a month.
Risking life and limb again while pursuing the
“queen of al-Qaeda” for his latest doc,
Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, the
37-year-old new dad explores the cinematic appeal of coming
out, coming out, wherever you are.
I’m much more Bravo than CNN, but I really
enjoyed your new film. Did you purposely try to make it
accessible for people like me?
It’s important to make anything that deals with
really dense, hard-to-swallow subjects interesting.
Every time you turn on the TV, there’s some
gloom and doom, so if you can do it with some sort of humor
or levity, it helps. This is one of those issues
that’s been around for a while, so we tried to
breathe some new life into it.
Have you gotten any flak for abandoning your
pregnant wife, Alexandra, to go find Osama bin Laden in
the Middle East?
Oh, my gosh, are you kidding me? It really upsets women.
There are countless women who are, like, “How
could you do that? You are a terrible husband!”
I’m, like, “You’re all suddenly
realizing what my wife already knows.” But Alex
really understood why I wanted to make this film --
especially once she got pregnant. We were already in the
early stages of pre-production on the movie when she
got pregnant, and there were conversations of
“Should I not go? Should I not do this?” But
it really changed my focus. It wasn’t just
about me trying to find this guy; it suddenly became a
much more personal experience, with the deeper question
of “What kind of a world am I bringing a kid
into?”
In a sense, isn’t Osama really just a big closet
case that happens to have the deepest, most hidden
closet in history?
[Laughs] He could be! Or is he even real? I
think Osama’s become almost like [The Usual Suspects
character] Keyser Söze -- he’s this guy
who’s everywhere and nowhere.
How do you explain Osama’s alleged obsession with
Whitney Houston?
Hey, don’t we all want to dance with somebody?
Did you meet any gays along your travels?
We met some incredible gay people. There were two
bloggers that we spoke to in Saudi Arabia, and one of
them is a gay guy. He talked about what it’s
like living in a country where there is an incredible amount
of sexual repression and a lot of things that you
can’t talk about or put out in the public eye,
homosexuality being one of them. He says there’s a
huge gay scene in Saudi Arabia, but it’s all
underground -- like, there’s a Starbucks where
you go meet other guys at a certain time on a certain
day. We had over 1,000 hours of footage, and you just
can’t put all of it in the movie, but
there’s a book that’s coming out the same time
as the film that expands on a lot of the stuff that I
experienced on my trip. And the DVD extras are going
to be amazing.
Click here to follow The Advocate on Twitter.
Page 1 of 3