A word from our sponsors... on evils of product placement

Even by his surreal standards, Morgan Spurlock’s latest film is a mind-bending proposition.

An attack on the consumer industry which looks at the issue of product placement in movies, it is a documentary movie funded entirely by product placement. Chuckling away on the end of the phone, Spurlock is in LA enjoying the fun that comes with being an Oscar-nominated documentary film-maker and mischief-maker par excellence. I tell him that I found the idea of it a genuinely baffling prospect.

Without the companies funding the movie, into which they were allowed to place their products, then The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (presented by POM Wonderful), about the evils of product placement, could not have been made. By the end I was cheering on the product placers because they were paying the money to get the movie made, and all the while also cheering on Spurlock for exposing the evils of product placement. As the credits roll you don’t know who you are supposed to be cheering.

Spurlock explains I am not alone. “At the premiere at Sundance (film festival), we had all 15 sponsors of the movie there and someone said ‘I want to applaud you all for being brave enough to put your money into this movie, but I feel really conflicted about watching it’,” Spurlock says.

The documentarian found himself in rare company in 2004, when his movie Super Size Me was thrust into the limelight and out of the small corner in which documentary film making normally finds itself. In the film Spurlock spent 30 days eating three McDonald’s meals a day, under strict medical supervision. The results were extreme in terms of what they did to Spurlock’s body (liver dysfunction, loss of sexual appetite, ballooning weight, and in one of the movie’s most dramatic scenes, his GP virtually begs him to stop the diet). The 30-day regime also had the effect of turning him into a superstar of the world of documentary.

“The idea was never for me to be in Super Size Me. We were going to get someone else to do it, but we realised that the only way we could be totally certain that whoever was involved in the film wasn’t cheating and was sticking to the rules, would be if I actually did it myself,” he says.

“It is very strange when people recognise you and know who you are, because in a doc as opposed to a movie, you are you. I’m not playing a character, I am myself and so people who have seen the movie know who I am and know the world I live in. That was odd.”

Something about the documentary, like last year’s Man on Wire or Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, enabled it to crossover into the mainstream. Spurlock was suddenly recognisable – he wasn’t going to be sharing red carpet space with Brad Pitt any time soon, but he was recognisably someone who was “in the movies”.

That kind of recognition confers status of legend in the documentary world to which Spurlock is usually confined. It is why he has been invited, along with his new movie, to open this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest, the city’s international documentary and digital media extravaganza, recognised as the leading documentary festival in the world. “When I was in Sheffield with Super Size Me, I had such a great time. The thing about a festival like Sheffield is that you get to spend time with your peers who love the same kind of movies and who are there to celebrate that.”

The film maker can expect a similarly warm welcome when he comes to the festival on opening night, June 8, with The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. “The idea to do something on product placement came from this realisation that our public space is being encroached upon all the time. We are constantly assailed by advertising. Someone in the movie sums it up when I ask where you can go to get away from advertising and he says – to sleep.”

Spurlock sets out to make his point by raising the $1.5m for the movie entirely through product placement – it took nine months to secure the first of 15 sponsors – POM pomegranate juice drink makers, who are heavily promoted throughout the film. In the end, the documentary becomes as much about the making of the movie itself as it is about product placement.

“There’s a song in the film at the end with the lyric “we solved all our problems with bigger problems” which I guess says a lot. I hope at the end of the movie people just stop and think about how it feels like it’s really hard to get away from advertising – but not if you try hard enough.”

Sheffield Doc/Fest, June 8 to 12. http://sheffdocfest.com.