Jeff Bercovici: Where do you draw the line between good and bad placement or sponsored content or whatever you call it?
Morgan Spurlock: In the middle of the movie somebody picks something up and holds it next to their face and then they take a drink. The car drives into the driveway and the logo comes right up into the frame. It's so in your face. Closeup on the watch. Closeup on the Ericsson phone, as in the past two 007 films.
JB: Or the dialogue about the watch in Casino Royale.
MS: The Omega scene on the train? "And you, with your watch that makes you look so smart and classy. . . ." All that is terrible. The fact that you're having a conversation about a watch is ridiculous. I'm a realist. I live in a real world. People drink Coke. They wear Nike tennis shoes. I'm all for that. But when people start talking about products in dialogue, suddenly, I'm out.
JB: Marketers seem to think it's the holy grail, but there are so many examples where it just comes across as silly and forced.
MS: Yeah, but then you have something like E.T. M&M's said no, Reese's Pieces came in. I'm a 12-year-old kid, I go to see E.T. I love it. I'm also a kid who loves M&M's and I love Reese's cups, and here's this new candy that's the best of both worlds. Literally, I walked out of that movie with my mom and said, "We have to get some of those right now." We went to Kroger on the way home. So it totally worked.
JB: The placements in your film are done with a wink. It's less about getting your endorsement than about showing the sponsor is in on the joke.
MS: It makes them look like they've got balls. We called every advertising agency, and only one would help us, Kirshenbaum & Bond. No product placement company would deal with us. And then we called 600 brands to be in the film, every category--every beverage, every airline, every shoe. Five hundred-plus companies said no, 20 said yes. I think it makes them look smart for being part of this movie that rips back the curtain and brave for saying, "We're going to give up control."
JB: Did you make the movie you wanted to make or compromise?
MS: That's the thing. You see the compromise happen. The contracts come in, and you see that I have to do an interview at a jetBlue terminal, on a jetBlue plane. I have to stay at Hyatts. I can't disparage the country of Germany.
JB: Why's that?
MS: It was a Mini Cooper clause. And it was only while I was in the car. Once I was outside the car I could disparage Germany all I wanted.
JB: Why didn't you find a mustache wax sponsor? Yours is just about the most famous mustache in America.
MS: Outside of porn, yeah. We tried. We called every mustache trimmer, every beard trimmer, every razor company, every shaving gel. It was amazing that none of them wanted to do it. We called Rogaine. I said, "Look, I'm losing my hair. You should do this movie." They didn't want to do it.
JB: They probably wanted a guy with a thick head of hair.
MS: That's exactly it.
