Morgan Spurlock's had a pretty good year -- he had the top documentary, Super Size Me, at the box office until Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 bumped him down to number two. Now, with a base of puking fast food retirees at his back, Morgan is touring colleges and high schools nationwide in order to spread his message of healthy living. Morgan talked to Street about his popular film and his new television show from the comforts of his Holiday Inn Express room.
What are you working on now?
We're working on a TV series for F/X right now ... It's a show called 30 Days, which is kind of a spin-off of the film ... The film does a great job of dealing with a very serious social issue in an entertaining way. And I said it would be great to translate a concept like that to television where we could deal with some very serious social ills in a way that's still engaging, without being preachy ... In the pilot we examined religion and ask the question, "What's it like to be a Muslim in America?" ... On this show, nobody wins a million bucks, nobody gets voted off. It's a show where we really want to get people to think a little bit.
You've earned a lot of comparisons to Michael Moore. Do you think it's because you're both similar, or because you both made the big-ticket documentaries of 2004?
I'm in the film, I drive a lot of the narrative, as I think Michael does in his. So I think naturally people are going to draw comparisons ... He and I each have our own styles ... Michael Moore is the man who brought documentary out to the mainstream masses ... I think you can't help but be compared to him.
Do you think people can force change? Will the companies change, or do we need new companies?
I think there are a couple things that should happen. I think, one, you'll start to see some healthier fast food chains arise ... The other thing that I think is most important is to really focus our efforts in schools, to do everything we can to change the food that we give to kids in schools, to change the way we educate them in schools. Because what we're basically doing is we're teaching kids to be overweight, we're teaching them to be obese, we're teaching them to be sick ... We're eliminating physical education, we're eliminating nutrition and health education. We're feeding them junk food every day in school. We're saying it's OK to live this way.
Were you ever worried about being sued?
When you're making a film like this, you really just can't think about it. You can't go there. You're dealing with a gigantic corporation and its history marks it as being an extremely litigious company. I felt coming off the McLibel case a few years ago that McDonald's wouldn't come after us ... That's exactly what happened ... When you make a movie like this, you have to make sure you build the film on an extremely strong foundation of truth ... So long as you do that, it's hard to refute the truth.
In your opinion, do you think this film stopped the Super Size at McDonald's?
McDonald's says that it has nothing to do with the film whatsoever. But I think everybody else who lives in the world of reality realizes that the film had a dramatic impact ... They may have been talking about doing away with it at some point, but by doing it six weeks after Sundance and six weeks before the film opened, right in the middle, it gave them enough leg room to still put out the argument of being proactive, rather than reactive. But I think that most people including myself think the film had a really huge part in that decision.
What do you think of Atkins?
I think Fatkins is terrible. It's a very unsustainable way of eating and living ... Everybody I know who has gone on Atkins the minute they go off ... they start eating the same way they were eating before they went on this diet. Eating tons and tons of stuff they really shouldn't be eating ... They eat more food than they should. They put the weight back on, something that happens to me now. Now if I overeat over the period of a weekend, I can put on three, four, five pounds easily. Those fat cells that are in your body when you lose weight, they never go away ... I think that people are being sold a bill of goods that they don't know the whole story on.
How hard was it to get off your McDonald's diet?
To this day, if I smell a Big Mac, my mouth will start watering like Pavlov's dog. But if I take a bite of it, it's the most un-food food-tasting thing in the world. It tastes like chemicals. It doesn't even taste like a real thing that you should be putting in your mouth or in your body. It doesn't taste like anything you should eat. For me, it's something that I can't even eat. My body is so hypersensitive to it, I can just tear it apart, I can just pick apart the food. The French fries taste like smoked plastic to me now.
Did it taste that way when you started?
No, that happened about three-fourths of the way through the diet ... I would eat this food and taste everything in it.
Has anyone tried to make a case against your film?
Most of the people who hate the film work for a company that has "Mc" in the title. Or they've been given money by a company that has "Mc" in the title. Like the lobbyists -- lobby groups hate the film. Of course they hate the film ... They get paid to attack me, to attack this film ... Every regular person who doesn't work in this food industry who has seen the film has been very, very supportive, and realizes that this film was done with the hope and intention of a greater good.
You put yourself out there on film, going as far as showing your rectal exam. Do you have any regrets?
For me, I realized going into this that if I was going to make a film that was truly honest with people then I needed to show my hand ... Out of all three doctors, only one showed me a rectal exam. I thought you needed to see that so that you would know, "Wow, this guy's really committed to doing this"... I only got sick once over the course of the entire thirty days ... You needed to see that ... it was on the second day. My body was saying, "Stop, stop what you're doing"... My girlfriend was very impacted in how the film affected our sex life. For me, every guy in the world needs to hear that ... McDonald's and some of their ilk have been like, "It's just a shock movie" ... And I'm like, "Well, you know what, sometimes life is shocking. Welcome to the real world." You know, this isn't McDonald's land. Sometimes, life can be shocking and that's what people get in some of these scenes.
Did you eat McDonald's as a child?
Maybe once a month we would go there. Once a month we went out to eat, period. To any restaurant, not just McDonald's ... I just did an interview with somebody else who said, "Of course you got fat and sick, what do you expect? If you ate nothing but chocolate every single day, you'd get sick too." And I'm like, "Wow, I think it's great that you compare this food to chocolate because it's exactly how it should be treated" ... The food is so loaded with fat and sugar and things you should not be putting a lot of in your body ... The nutritionist in the film said you should eat this once a month. I agree ... I'm not telling you never to eat a Big Mac. For me, as somebody who still loves a really good burger -- but a good burger to me doesn't come from McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King or any of these places -- but ... if you want to eat that, then go ahead, but be smart about it ... Think how many calories you're taking in when you do that, because most of us don't.
What do you say to the critics who say fast food is too easy to totally eliminate?
Former Surgeon General David Thatcher said, "If you don't make time to take care of yourself now, you better make time to be in hospitals later." Our actions now impact us later in life ... People say, "Well, it's cheaper to eat fast food." Well, it's cheaper because you don't know how to cook. That's why. My mom would cook chicken on a Sunday night and damn if come Thursday we still weren't eating that chicken in some form. It would be chicken on Sunday, sandwiches on Monday, some sort of stew on Tuesday, a chicken pot pie on Wednesday and something else on Thursday, in the final stages of the chicken meal ... We don't know how to stretch a dollar anymore. We don't know how to cook effectively, prepare food quickly ... We're scared of being trapped in the kitchen.
