Music, Style & Culture

Interview: Morgan Spurlock

We catch up with the filmmaker to discuss The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

Last week we had the fortune to catch up with the thoroughly engaging Morgan Spurlock.

The Oscar-nominated Super Size Me filmmaker follows up his 2008 documentary Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? with another light-hearted exposé. Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold looks at product placement and advertising, with Spurlock actually funding the entire project with company sponsorship.

We took part in an intimate round table chat with Spurlock during his London visit. Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold hits UK cinemas 14th October.

How did the project come about?
The film was kind of a convergence of a couple of ideas, one being the ubiquitousness of advertising and marketing, that you can't kind of leave your house without someone trying to sell you something – it's like everywhere you go, there's somebody trying to get you to buy a shoe, a car, a hat, a whatever. And then combine that with the takeover of entertainment by brands, this kind of co-opting of entertainment through product placement and advertising. And there was an episode of Heroes in particular – and I loved season one of Heroes. Season two of Heroes suddenly started to have all this product placement in it and in one episode, Hayden Panettiere the cheerleader was leaving school one day and she was all unhappy, they moved to another town, she was very upset, her birthday was coming up, she thought things were going to be different and her dad says, 'Aww, honey, your mom and I, we're really proud of you and we were going to save this till your birthday but here you go' and he reaches into his pocket and as he does so, the camera cuts to the front of a car and dollies past the Nissan logo, cuts back to him holding the keys in front of her face and then it racks focus to her face and she goes, '(gasp) The Rogue? The Nissan Rogue? Oh my God, dad, the Rogue!' and as I watched this girl gush over a mini-van, I said, 'That's the jumping off point, right there, that's where we start.'

When you approached people, did you tell them that it was a narrative feature or were you straight up about what you were doing?
No, we were straight up saying we're making a documentary, I said, 'We're making a documentary film where the goal is to pull the curtain back on advertising and product placement, show how it works, you know, warts and all, show how the sausage actually does get made' and I mean, no, we were as transparent as we wanted the film to be, which was important for me. And it took a long time – I mean, first of all when we got the idea, I said, 'Well, we have to get advertising agencies, that's who we need to help us, because they have kind of the keys to the kingdom with regard to these brands. And no advertising company in the United States would touch this, it felt like – we called over a hundred companies and only one – Kirsch and Baum and Bond, who you see in the film – agreed to help us at all. So then I said, 'Okay, fine, we'll call the product placement companies', so we called every product placement company in New York, L.A., Chicago, San Francisco, same thing, none of them would help us with the film, scared to death of the movie and only two of them – Britt Johnson and Norm Marshall, who you see in the film – would even do an interview with us, for the movie. So then we said, 'Okay, fine, we'll take our destiny into our own hands, we'll start calling the brands ourselves' and so then we started cold-calling companies and we called over 650 companies to sponsor the film and ultimately we ended up getting 15 to actually say yes. And that was a long process – from the time I called the first company to the first company saying yes was nine months, so it was from January 2009 to September, September is when Ban deodorant came on board.

Did you record all the responses?
We recorded everything. Or as much as we could – we were cold-calling companies so we're burning footage and you're burning money at the same time, because at this point we're paying for everything and so I said, 'You know, we can't just keep shooting everything because phone calls are boring, so there's nothing happening. The minute the DP or you decide not to shoot, the day after that, you have an amazing phone call. And if you're in the middle of a phone call and somebody's saying something, you're in the back of your head, all I'm going is, 'We're not filming this. We're not filming this right now'. And so then the next day you call the cameraman back and you go through days of nothing happening but you do what you do.

Did you have a sort of check-list for things that you knew you needed?
Well, there's ten kind of categories that you know you're going to cover when you're dealing with product placement. You're going to get a car, you're going to get a shoe, you're going to get a beverage, you're going to get a hotel, you're going to get an airline, you're going to get a clothing company, you're going to get some sort of a bank, a credit card. And you just go through that check-list of those things. A fast food company, which no fast food company would talk to us – big surprise. Or we couldn't get any of them to agree. So you use that as your jumping off point and then you know, 'Here's your top of the list brands', so of course Pom was not the first beverage we called of course, the first brand was Coke. So you call Coke, you call Pepsi, they say no, we call Gatorade, they say no, you call all the way down the line, Red Bull, [makes rapid ticking noise] tuh tuh tuh tuh, until you get to beverage number 30-something, which was probably Pom at that point.

Were the companies that you did use aware of how many other companies had turned you down beforehand?
No, they had no idea. None of them had any idea. And when I showed up at Pom, I was like, 'And when I got the idea for this film, I thought of you first', I was like, 'You are the people that should be sponsoring this film', so they all thought they were the first choice up until the film was actually made.

Did your opinion of advertising change, between the beginning and the end of the film?
Erm, I think that what I realised with this film was the value of – the real value of co-promotion. Because what happened with this film is we were able to harness the marketing power of 22 brands, you know, because when the film came out in theatres we went from 15 brands that were on at Sundance to 22, we signed on seven more during that period. So to have 22 companies that are lending you marketing support, advertising support, letting us take over their websites, have access to their mailing lists, their Twitter feeds, Facebook, the social media, the conglomerates they have their outreach in made a huge difference, just in the awareness of the movie. So that, for me, changed a lot and kind of understanding the value of that. And what also I think changed for me was really having a deeper understanding of how manipulative advertising is, the whole idea of neural marketing, the idea that they're putting people in MRI machines just so they can further manipulate you and lessen that idea of free will by getting the majority of the responses to be identical, is frightening. It is as futuristic and as scary as you can get today. It'll get scarier but right now that's probably one of the scariest things that's happening today.

The contracts were also pretty scary from the looks of them. Do your contractual obligations extend to the press tour?
One of the things that happened – in most of our contracts, I think Pom it was when I would go on television or when I would go places that I would make best efforts to take Pom with me and we went to countries, like I just visited Norway and Sweden, Pom hasn't gotten there yet so it's not like I'm going to be carrying Pom in my suitcase just to make sure it happens – if it's not there, it's not there, there's nothing I can do. But it's in the UK, so it makes sense that we have Pom here and all these things kind of fit into the never-ending narrative of the movie and kind of helping to create the same reason why I made the film, the ubiquitousness of advertising and marketing, so that when you walk out of the movie – you know, when we started screening the film for critics in the States, they would walk out of the movie and as soon as they would walk out, there would be Pom girls outside the theatre handing them Poms. And one of the things that happens when you watch this film is you do crave it, you want one. And so when you walk out, you get it when someone hands it to you and you take a drink and you're like, 'Holy shit, they got me', because I wanted one, I walked out of the theatre and I got one and there's a real full circle that happens in those moments that I think is beautiful. And that's really what I think makes the movie work on a lot of levels.

Were you surprised about how open the film-makers were that you spoke to, like Peter Berg, for example?
Amazing. I think it shows you that once you reach a certain level of success as a director, I think you can really speak your mind. It's different – I tried to get A-list actors to go on camera and talk to us and I could not get one A-list actor to sit down and talk about, you know, a scene where they had to hold that can next to their face or pull up in the car or say a line of dialogue about a shoe. I couldn't get one person to talk to us. Because I think it's different for actors, I think there is still a perception of actors, of judgement – there's a tremendous level of judgement that goes around actors that's very different from a director. But yeah, his candidness, his candour, I applaud those guys. For Peter Berg to be so blunt and honest and basically lay it out and say, 'Listen, these guys don't give a fuck about art, they want to make money, it's a business', that was – I love that guy.

Do you have a favourite scene from the film?
I have so many favourite scenes... I love when I'm on the phone with Mane 'n' Tail. I'm talking to them on the phone, and telling them how you'll see them in the movie, and you're actually seeing that happen in real time. Every time I see the movie, I love that scene, it's great. I love the scene when I'm pitching to POM about their commercials, and they're shooting down my ideas in the room. I love the climax of the film - I love that we got OK Go to do the theme song to the movie. I love that everything we critique at the beginning is everything we use to sell you the movie at the end. All those things became part of the promotional campaign, and still are. I love that you see those things actually happen.



Did you have to cut anything out of the film that you hated to lose?
No. We made a made a really tight film. We had an amazing editor called Tom Vogt, who came from an incredible comedy background. He cut about 85 episodes of South Park, he cut the Bigger Longer & Uncut South Park movie, he cut Team America: World Police. He moved to New York City because he got tired of Hollywood. He said he wanted to do something different. So when he came to New York he started working in the advertisement business, cutting commercials. That's when I first met him, through my friend Julie Bob Lombardi, who edited Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? Tom and I became very good friends, and he said 'listen, I want to do a documentary - whenever you've got anything, let me know.' For a couple of years we stayed in touch, and when I got the idea for Greatest Movie, I said I've got the perfect movie for you. It's such a marriage of everything you've done - a classic marriage of comedy and advertising. It was a blessing to get him on board, so the best stuff ended up in the movie.

Oh there is one scene, which ended up on the DVD, which we loved, but couldn't find a way to put it in the movie. It's with Robert Weissman from Public Citizen, who talks about wanting to have arrows pointing everything out. I ask him about kids, and he said kids will buy anything. We talk about co-promotion, and he said 'if you put a character on things, they'll buy anything with Spongebob on it - you should try that.' So I took a five-year-old shopping in a store, where I put characters on products kids would never buy, in a grocery store. Kids started going down the aisles with their shopping carts, buying what they would buy, but at the same time picking up things they would never buy. For example, we had a can of motor oil that I put Iron Man on. There was a box of dog food I put Clifford the Big Red Dog on, I got a box of condoms that I put Spider-Man on. A box of Tampax that I put Spongebob on. There's a little boy holding a box of Tampax, as I'm saying, 'why did you buy that?' 'Because it's got Spongebob!' The guy's holding Trojan condoms because he thinks they're vitamins, as they've got Spider-Man on them. I asked why he got those, and he said 'I think they make you shoot webs.' It's the most brilliant thing, but there's nowhere to put it in the movie, as it's so out of left field.

What do you want the viewer to take away?
For me, a couple of things. One is, I would love for a city to stand up and do what Sao Paulo did. I would love for individuals to say how much is too much. Where do we draw the line? Where should there be places that are free from advertising? I don't think it's just schools - there are places I should be able to go outside where I'm not looking at a giant Citibank ad, or an Adidas logo. There should be parks and playgrounds that are free from this cacophany of marketing we get on a daily basis.

Have you ever had an idea that you haven't been able to get started?
That's the great thing that's really happened in the last few years - I've been afforded the ability to go after a number of things we haven't been able to do. There's a show called A Day in the Life, which I've been trying to do for years. It's for a web service called Hulu in the US. There's another idea called The Failure Club, which we're now doing for Yahoo, which will air later on this year. There's ideas that I've wanted to do that we've chipped away at, but nothing really dies with our company. It has to really die a hard death for us to give up on it. There's a couple things we keep trying... Post-Super Size Me and Where in the World, I've been fortunate to keep making the shows I want to make, which is incredible.

How do you structure the movie, and a narrative?
Usually when we have an idea, my writing partner Jeremy and I, we sit down and say, 'in a perfect world of rainbows and unicorns, what would the movie be?' What's the most perfect idea of a film to have happen to you? You outline the movie out - here's who we would talk to, this is what would happen. Then you start shooting, and nothing that's in that document ever happens. Once you start shooting, everything you imagined happening goes out of the window. People you think will talk to you won't, people you don't think will talk to you will. It becomes a very different movie. We start out with a road map of an idea before we start shooting. Post making my TV show 30 Days, we now start editing almost concurrently with shooting. While we're in the field, we're constantly putting scenes together, so know where the narrative is going. We start writing simultaneously with the V.O. - what are the bridges, the thoughts putting together the links in the chain? The writing happens during the editing process - in real time.

How did you get your first big break?
In the film industry? I think the first big break I got was right out of college. I was working as an intern at the Tribeca Film Center, which was Robert De Niro's film production building, so there were tonnes of different productions working in there. Every day I kept pestering one of the productions, by Eric McGinty, who was the first AD on a movie that was shooting in the United States, out of France, called Leon - Luc Besson's film. I would pester them, going 'have you hired any PAs yet?' Finally, they said 'Can you speak Spanish?' [utters Spanish response] 'You're hired.' So the first break I got was working on that film out of college. It was my first film set, and I got access to so many great people. It really gve me a great insight into the process and the reality of filmmaking, as there I am with my college degree in filmmaking, thinking I was going to go out and make films straight away, and here I was, shovelling horse shit from the police horses that rode through the shot. 'Boy, if only mom could see me now. Dad always said I would be doing this!' The best thing that happened to me was getting on that movie right out of college.

What advice would you give to young filmmakers?
The thing I tell young filmmakers all the time is 'don't quit'. That's number one. It's a really hard business. It's a hard business to find your place in, to make it in, and to continue to make a living in. I went to film school with people who were infinitely more talented than me, who were much better writers, much better storytellers, brilliant directors, who are now brilliant real estate agents, and great bankers, and great coffee shop managers. These are people who gave up. If you stick around long enough and continue to work - Woody Allen said 50% of the entertainment business is just showing up. If you continue to show up and be around, things will happen for you. You will find your place in the business. It may not be what you envisioned - I went to film school because I wanted to make narrative movies more than anything. I started a web company in my late twenties, launched shows on the internet, sold those shows to MTV, they cancelled the show, I took that money and made Super Size Me. You can't predict your path. You need to be open to other opportunities as well.

Do you feel in recent years documentaries have been forced to become more sensationalist to appeal to a mainstream audience?
No, I feel that documentaries have become more popular automatically, and have grown to be more attractive to a mainstream audience. I think that Michael Moore showed that documentaries can be entertaining, and post him making films, they have a broader acceptance. I think the death of investigative journalism has given documentaries a tremendous amount of credibility, and a leg-up of news reportage, as you can't get long form reporting any more. The networks give you sound-bites on stories. The US has one or two shows that will do in depth reporting.

Can you tell us about Comic-Con?
My next movie, which we just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is a film that speaks very much to my inner geek. It's a movie called Comic-Con Episode Four: A Fan's Hope, and it's all about the pop culture mecca that is San Diego Comic-Con. We follow seven people into this giant cultural phenomenon, and we tell the story of its impact, the passion people have for it, and how and why it's become so big. I'm not in one frame of that movie. I don't do the voiceover for the film. If anyone has hated any movie I've made up until now, then they're going to love Comic-Con Episode Four, yeah! After that, not sure. We're finishing a movie right now that's all about male grooming, with Will Arnett and Jason Bateman, which is very funny. The film you see us talking about in [Greatest Movie Ever Sold], we've made that film. That will probably be the next movie.