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Morgan Spurlock talked with the press in Los Angeles recently about his upcoming film, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? I want to share some excerpts from that press conference that give a flavor of what the film is and seeks to do.

When asked where the idea for the film came from, he said:

It was 2005 when we started talking about what my next movie would be. We'd just finished the first season of 30 Days. Super Size Me did something none of us anticipated, which was play in about 75 countries around the world. It went so beyond our borders. The way it did that made me realize that my next movie I wanted to be something that dealt with an issue on a global scale and wasn't just an American issue, which this was.

I live in New York City so this issue 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 a second term and Osama had released a tape and suddenly the tape was everywhere—every television station, every radio station. People were talking about him again. He was pretty ubiquitous. Newscasts 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 good question; I'd like to know that as well."

We started formulating how we'd make a movie like this—how we would start trying to formulate the answers or tackle this topic... About two months into this project is when we found out that 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 bringing a kid into? I think that kind of shift made it more personal for me and made the journey we went on and the people we went to talk to... ultimately made the film better.

He was asked what would have happened if he had actually found bin Laden.

We talked about it, [cinematographer] Daniel Maraschino and myself, what would happen if we would actually get to find him or get to speak with him. A lot of people have asked "what would you have said to him?" or "what would you have asked him?" The biggest thing for me would have been I'd like to hear from him: How's it end? How does it stop? How does the killing of innocent people end? How can the hatred end? How can it get to the point that there's peace and security for everybody? Maybe he's got a real answer. Maybe something real would have come out with actual steps. And we might have gotten a whole lot of crazy. But who knows. We would have gotten an answer and that would have been interesting.

Similarly, he was also asked what would have happened if bin Laden had been found while he was making the film. Noting that it would have likely ruined the film, he went on:

Even if they would have found him, I think a lot of things people talk about over the course of the movie would have remained the same. What you see happening over the course of the movie is as much as Osama bin Laden is not in Egypt or Morocco or Saudi Arabia or the Palestinian Territories or Afghanistan or Pakistan, he is in all those places. The spirit of Osama bin Laden, his ideology, the way that he thinks have infiltrated these countries, especially like people who are that minority of people that get all the airtime 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—people 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 portrait of what life is like in the Middle East for a lot of these people on a daily basis.

One question dealt with if he was prepared for the way America's image has become among the people he met and that they don't really like us.

I think they don't like America's foreign policy as much as they used to. I think people still have a tremendous amount of hope in what America means and what America is. America is a dream and an ideology and a hope that things can always be getter. And that's how a lot of people see the United States still. I think a lot of that has been shattered over the course of— Some people it's been five years, some people it's been ten, fifteen years; but you heard consistently and as we spoke to people consistently it's that we don't hate American people, but we hate what's happened to the American government and what's kind of transpired.

We're still taught that people hate us and it's "they" hate "us"—them, those people. Everybody's grouped into the one thing. Islam is a monolithic thing. That's just not the case. We like things to be very simple and in a little package. I think it's much more broad than that. I think that over the course of the film where I go on my travels you see that in all the countries we go to there's even a much more diverse brand of Islam in all of these countries and how it's practiced. I personally also thought I'd be met with a lot more hostility—a lot more resentment, that people wouldn't want to talk to me because I was an American. They weren't going to want to sit down and open up. It was completely the opposite. People were really eager to sit town and share their feelings and share their outlook and share their opinion.

These people who don't get to speak in a lot of these countries—these people live in countries where if you speak up you go to jail. And that's terrible. For them to be able to sit down with somebody who they see as from the western media and actually be able to express their thoughts, knowing that it could potentially reach people back in America is very brave.

One scene in the film shows the animosity he came across among a group of very Orthodox Jews in Israel. He explained a bit about that scene and that it only involved a few people, even though a larger crowd developed. He then went on to tell what made that scene important for him.

For me the greatest thing that came out of that scene is the guy who comes up to me—and makes 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 who are getting aggressive and angry and being very loud—this very small group of people in the entire neighborhood, we're not like them." I mean he was really concerned about perception—how am I going to be perceived because of what these people are doing?

And I think there's a fantastic parallel to that with all the people we meet over the course of the film, which is also [the problem of ] 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.