PR.com (Allison Kugel): When you were a student at NYU, what were your aspirations or ideas of the kind of films that you thought you’d be making? And is it in line with what you’re doing right now?

Morgan Spurlock: I think when I was at film school, like most of the people I was in film school with, I wasn’t really looking to be a doc[umentary] filmmaker. That happened just by happenchance when we made Super Size Me (Spurlock’s 2005 Oscar nominated documentary that takes aim at the fast food industry), that I just fell in love with something that I didn’t know was going to affect me the way it did. When I was in school I wanted to make narrative films. I wrote screenplays and short stories and short plays. Before I ended up making this film, I was writing a lot of plays in New York City. I had a play that went up and won an audience award in Fringe Festival in 1998, and I had a few different one-act [plays] that were put up around the city in little one-act festivals. That was kind of the path I was heading in before I made Super Size Me.

PR.com: How did you come up with the idea for Super Size Me and how did you start in this trend of using yourself as the guinea pig in your films?

Morgan Spurlock: We had a show that was on MTV called I Bet You Will that got cancelled, and we had about fifty grand saved up in the bank and so I basically said, “Let’s take this fifty thousand dollars and make a movie.” I had just finished an adaptation of a play I had written called The Phoenix Two, a screenplay. I started watching a lot of plays that had been made into movies, and they all kind of felt like plays that were made into movies. They didn’t really feel like a stand alone film. I said, “We’ll come up with something else. I’ll think of another idea.” And it was Thanksgiving of that year; it was 2002, when there was a news story about these two girls who were suing McDonald’s. Then the [McDonald’s] spokesperson came on and said, “But our food is healthy, it’s good for you…”

PR.com: Did he really say that??

Morgan Spurlock: Oh yeah, it was fantastic! Because it basically went from the lawsuit about these two girls where they’re like, “We’re suing McDonald’s for being unhealthy.” And I was like, that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. So they’re going to sue a company that sells them food that they buy, and that they eat and then blame them for it?! And then the spokesperson for McDonald’s comes on and says, “You can’t link our food to these girls being sick. You can’t link our food to these girls being obese. Our food is healthy. It’s nutritious. It’s good for you.” Then the light went off and I was like, well if it’s that good for me, then shouldn’t I be able to eat it for 30 days straight with no side effects? When we first got the idea for Super Size Me, the original thought was that I’ll get somebody else to be that person. I’ll shoot the film and we’ll have somebody else be the person who eats the food for the 30 days. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I couldn’t trust that somebody was not gonna, when the cameras weren’t rolling, sneak a piece of broccoli (laughs)…

PR.com: (Laughs) Or a vitamin, yeah…

Morgan Spurlock: Yeah, exactly, like, taking vitamins on the sly (laughs). That was the biggest reason that I did it myself.

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