Morgan Spurlock went from being a humble documentary filmmaker to becoming a bona fide media figure with the release of Super Size Me, his account of eating nothing but McDonald’s food products for a month. While the movie certainly made important observations about American eating habits and the industry that feeds them, Super Size Me was also entertaining, becoming a verifiable box-office hit. Now, Spurlock has taken a similar approach with his new documentary series on FX, 30 Days, in which he films people being placed in roles outside of their typical lives. In the first episode, he and his girlfriend Alex Jamieson lived on minimum wage for a month—and barely squeaked by. How does an earnest filmmaker convince large media corporations to air reality TV programming that doesn’t involve bikinis or swallowing bugs? It ain’t easy, but Spurlock perseveres with his wit and social conscious intact.
How does it feel from going from humble documentary filmmaker to famous media figure?
It’s interesting when you can get all your phone calls returned. It’s a great thing! Still, it’s just an overwhelming thing that’s happened very quickly. It’s still difficult just to figure out every day. That’s the thing; it’s one of those things where you have the opportunity to do just about anything you can think of. What do you do? It’s good; I’m surrounded by a lot of good people, a lot of good friends who have no problem keeping me in check.
Has notoriety made your job easier or more difficult?
It has made it easier, I think. For so long I was struggling to get meetings and meet certain people and trying to get things off the ground. It’s made it a lot more possible to do things, whether it is film or television.
Do you feel as if you’ve become “the hamburger guy” in the public’s mind?
I’m that guy, I’m totally that guy, and will be that guy. I had a great conversation with Eric Schlosser about this, he wrote the book Fast Food Nation. He said, “The thing you need to realize is that you are going to be married with this forever.” He said it’s kind of like a wife: you may get divorced, but people are still going associate you with this “X” thing you did. But for me, it’s not a bad thing because I’m proud of the movie. The movie did a really great job of helping to educate some people and look at their own lives differently. For a few more years, that’s what I’ll be associated with. But at least now there are other things happening. There’s the show we’re doing for FX, there’s the book that came out a month ago that gave me a little bit more closure to my fast food odyssey. And as we go on there may be something else. Maybe next thing I’ll be “that pizza guy” or “that Coke guy” or “that Wal-Mart guy.”
What’s the main idea behind your new show, 30 Days?
The basic premise of the show enables someone to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes—see the world through someone else’s eyes. And the goal for us was to make you kind of look at this world around you—a lot of the time, we walk through with blinders on and don’t pay attention. What we do is take someone out of their life and we immerse them in another situation, something that is opposite to their own very, very different environment. The person isn’t surrounded by the safety net, the friends, the comfort zones that they had before. Suddenly, they’re very vulnerable. And these people are brave enough to make themselves vulnerable, which is really admirable in many ways, very courageous. And so over this period of time, you see breaking points. You see them start to question the ideologies that they had, the way they look at the world, the way they think. Do they jump to conclusions? Are they judgmental? Do I need to evaluate the way I looked at this situation before I got here?
What particular episode really illustrates the concept?
First, God bless FX for even putting a show like this on the air—you know, for saying we want a show that deals with social issues. And like Super Size Me, the show is very funny, very entertaining, but has a serious bent to it at the same time. In one episode we took a Christian from my home state of West Virginia and for 30 days he moved into a Muslim family in Dearborn, Michigan. During that time he lived the life of a Muslim: dressed like a Muslim, ate as a Muslim, prayed five times a day, just as Muslims do in their culture, and really became immersed in this American Muslim culture. It’s not like these are people who just got off the boat to America; these people are American-born Muslim citizens of the United States who, in a post-9/11 world, have been treated very differently and are judged in a lot of ways. They are seen as “threats to our freedom” simply because their color and their race and religion. It was an amazing journey for this guy David Stacy to go through. I think the show really does a great job of saying “you can’t judge a book by its cover.”
