When Morgan Spurlock, the maverick mind behind the hit 2004 documentary Super-Size Me, decided to make the film Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?, his initial goal was to find and capture the terrorist leader. But as the project evolved (and Osama remained too hard to locate), Spurlock said he "realized that finding this guy isn't the answer," the Guardian reports.
So what was? "I always wanted to learn what shaped him and his followers," says Spurlock, whose film recently debuted at Sundance and who learned Arabic and anti-kidnapping strategies before setting out. In his travels to Morocco, Israel, Egypt, and Afghanistan, Spurlock found the moderate, ordinary people he decided to showcase instead. "All we hear about are the extremists, the terrorists, because it's all about fear and scare tactics." (More Morgan Spurlock stories.)