As soon as you meet MORGAN SPURLOCK (Super-Size Me), the writer-director-and frontman of the new documentary WHERE IN THE WORLD IS OSAMA BIN LADEN?, you quickly realise there’s little artifice about this man. He admits later “my wife often reminds me that I’m not a good actor. So it’s pretty much what you see is what you get!” TIM MILFULL reports.

In his whirlwind tour of the Middle East and other countries to learn more about the world’s most wanted man, and maybe even find him, Spurlock’s down-home charm and relative naïveté often shines though. This doesn’t seem like an act.

I’ve caught Spurlock within hours of getting off the plane to Brisbane to promote his new film at the Brisbane and Melbourne international film festivals, and for someone with a reputation as a motormouth, Spurlock doesn’t disappoint.

A colleague told me to ask him about the difference in perceptions of male and female filmmakers running off to risk their lives in the search for a story. He laughs:  “I think it’s different if Alex [his wife] had been going to do this – she would have been overseas with child. It’s a different thing. If the husband could suddenly take over the childbirth and doing the child-rearing at home, I’m sure you’d see more men than women go do that. With she and I, there was a real conversation and a lot of talking that happened. We were about two months into even thinking about making a film like this when we found out Alex was pregnant, and there was a real kind of ‘hold-the-phone’ moment at that point. Was this the smartest thing to do? Should I be traipsing all over throughout the Middle East and some very dangerous territories when we’re about to become parents. For me, that’s one of the big shifts in the film in terms of what I wanted to explore. It wasn’t just: Where is he? Why haven’t we found him? But: What kind of a world am I about to bring a kid into? The more she and I talked about that, the more she was incredibly supportive of me doing it, because she thought there was something really valuable in doing that, and meeting people overseas who had kids, and talking to families.”

And this is the essence of Spurlock’s latest film. While he admits the possibility of finding Bin Laden was next to none – You buy a lottery ticket knowing that the odds are so slim, that there’s absolutely no chance, but you never know – it’s a dollar and a dream!” – his film is more about what he might learn along the way. “We thought that the journey to understanding would be just as interesting; the journey to try and find him, to understand him, what he’s about, and why people follow him. I thought there’s gotta be something there. For me, that’s where the best stuff came out of.”

And some of the most interesting, frightening and poignant moments in Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? involve chance meetings in the street, interviews with anyone from madrassa students in Peshawar, high school students in Saudi Arabia, or bomb disposal experts in Israel, to a bizarre sit-down in Morocco with one of the architects of Al Qaeda. All the while, Spurlock delivers his spiel with customary mix of good humour and aplomb. Although there was one unnerving moment in suburban Jerusalem: “That area is called Mea Shearim, which is the ultra orthodox area of Jerusalem …We said, ‘great, we’ll go here, do a couple of interviews, and we’ll go get some lunch. It’ll be fine’. So we got in there, started asking political questions. Suddenly, a crowd starts gathering, people start screaming and yelling. Next thing you know, they got confrontational. Our fixer freaked out. They were surrounding us. He called the police to come get us out of there, and the police show up and escort us out.

“The best part about that scene, the most beautiful part about that scene that people seem to miss all the time, is the ultra orthodox kid who comes up to me once this all starts happening, when people are screaming and yelling at us. He says: ‘What you see here, the majority of us don’t think like them. That’s not who we are’ … I think there’s a fantastic parallel for him and people in every other Muslim country that we see on the media for the rest of the film.”

Spurlock might not have smoked out OBL, but his travels offered a rich variety of stories, that are often not given voice.

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS OSAMA BIN LADEN? opens in cinemas on Thursday, rated [M].

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