by MATTHEW HAYS

The stunt at the heart of New York filmmaker Morgan Spurlock's directorial debut, Super Size Me, has already become the stuff of documentary legend.

Inspired by the failed lawsuit of two young women who tried to sue McDonald's for making them obese, Spurlock decided to go on a McDonald's-only diet for one month and see what transpired. Watched over carefully with regular checkups by a team of physicians and nutritionists, Spurlock becomes unhealthy at a rate that is alarming, even from the perspective of someone with a good knowledge of nutrition. His metamorphosis feels almost like the non-fiction version of the evolution of a protagonist in a Cronenberg movie: Spurlock gains 24 pounds. He sprouts a gut. His liver becomes, as one doctor tells him, "like paté." Spurlock is urged to get off the diet or risk serious health problems. He even throws up for the camera, after imbibing a drive-thru not-so-happy meal.

But Spurlock's film is much more than a high-calorie, non-nutritional stunt. The filmmaker offers up protein and fibre for the mind with this meal, exploring the growing obesity crisis in America and exposing what many American school cafeterias are serving children for lunch. It's pretty unsavoury stuff, and very effectively done. And that's something that has audiences flocking to the film - and corporate types very nervous about how this will damage their fast-food stock options. McDonald's has already announced they will be fazing out their Super Size portions, though they claim this has nothing to do with Spurlock's movie - an entirely dubious claim.

Spurlock talked to the Mirror about his film, for which he won the best director award at Sundance, from his Manhattan office.

Mirror: I sat down with a friend to watch this and I joked that we should go get some McDonald's to watch the film with. I'm so glad we didn't.

Morgan Spurlock: (Laughs) Yeah, not such a great idea.

M: The film has had such an overwhelming response.

MS: It's really amazing. When you make a movie, you don't know what's going to happen. You have really high hopes, but you never know. You try to make the very best film you can. Then you get into Sundance, and you're like, ‘Oh my God, we got into Sundance!' And then it was so well received. And I met Redford, and he liked it. And if Bob liked it, that's it! I could go home right now! Then it got into theatres, and it's playing right now and people are loving it. There's something else every day that happens with it. I'm so thankful and so humbled by everything that's happening. This is every first filmmaker's dream.

Spurlock Holmes

M: One of our national newspapers, the conservative National Post, wrote an editorial about Super Size Me. They were suggesting your movie was obvious and that the next thing you were going to do was to make a film about how booze gives you a hangover. They called you Spurlock Holmes. It was clear by reading the editorial, however, that whoever was writing it hadn't even seen your film.

MS: I love the people who write reviews and pick it apart and haven't even seen the film. Not to mention the ones who completely miss the point. For me, it's no problem with people saying they disagree with the film. Obviously, one of the great things with living in a country with free speech is that people can say whatever they like. I love that! The people who have just critiqued the film without having seen it are odd. People will say, "You can't blame McDonald's for the obesity epidemic." And I'm like, "I don't blame McDonald's, go see the movie." "Of course if you eat it three times a day it's bad, no one does that." And I'm like, "I don't say that in the film, go see it."

M: Have you heard about the Competitive Enterprise Institute's film that counters yours, in which a woman eats McDonald's for a month and loses weight?

MS: What a coincidence, that the biggest people trying to fight the movie are a company that's funded by the food companies, the tobacco companies and the petroleum companies. You have to really examine the motives of these people. And the woman who stars in the film, she states in her diary that the first things she did were to start exercising and eat less. Precisely the two things we are not doing in America!

All the right-wingers want to see Super Size Me as an attack on McDonald's, pointing to all the good things they've done. They see it as about freedom of choice. They're trying to save a corporation. I'm trying to save a population. I'm trying to educate people as to how we're living in America. And not just in America, because now we've exported this way of life around the world. We are franchising out our way of life, a way of overeating and under-exercising. All thanks to us.

Cost of healthy living

M: When people talk about choice it bothers me, because in some neighbourhoods the choice is between a number of fast food franchises and little else. That's hardly a big choice.

MS: Or you go to a grocery store and the vegetables are in bad shape, or the most expensive thing in there. The healthiest food is the most expensive. I think the healthiest food should cost the least amount. We need to get our priorities back in order. We need to get our school lunch programs back in healthy order. That's the scariest part of the movie for me, is the state of our school lunches. We feed our kids garbage. We justify it by saying the schools get subsidies and kickbacks from the companies. That's not a reason to not want to feed your kids well. Meanwhile, phys ed classes and health classes are being cut. That's a very bad message to send to our young people. To say that exercise isn't that important, while all these Ding Dongs and HoHos and pizza and french fries and cookies and chips are okay. We're putting them on a path to get sick.

M: Has Michael Moore seen your film?

MS: I met Michael Moore at the Full Frame Film Festival in North Carolina. He was very supportive, though he hasn't seen the film yet. He's a great filmmaker.

M: How do you feel about some of the criticism of his work? For example, I loved Bowling for Columbine, but as a Canadian I had to cringe at certain moments. When Moore shows shots of what he refers to as a Canadian slum, and then shows a lovely neighbourhood, I think that allows Canadian audiences to become very complacent about our own issues with poverty, which are different but no less serious than those faced by Americans. It's not like we don't have slums here.

MS: I think that people go into Michael's films knowing what they're going to get. I don't think there are a lot of surprises. I think people know what his voice is and what's going to be delivered through that voice. He's a great filmmaker and a great voice in our country today. He says what he believes and speaks his mind. It's a great thing to have in this country, especially right now when we really need it.

M: Do you eat junk food anymore?

MS: You know what? I love a good cheeseburger. But if I eat one, I want to eat a good cheeseburger. I'm going to go somewhere where you get one that's made with real meat right there that hasn't been trucked half way across the country. Get yourself a McDonald's burger, and scrape everything off of it, the cheese, the sauce, the pickles, the mustard and bun and everything else. Just eat the patty all by itself. Take a bite of that and tell me what it tastes like. Because it sure doesn't taste like a patty to me. It tastes like a meat-flavoured chewable thing.

Super Size Me opens Friday, May 21

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