Morgan Spurlock begins second season as CNN's 'Inside Man'

PASADENA, Calif. Documentarian Morgan Spurlock has focused his cameras on everything from the fast food industry to education. The new season of his CNN series, Morgan Spurlock Inside Man, will deal with such broad topics as celebrity, futurism, pets in America, income inequality and college athletes.

Long before the public gets to see his work told through a serious investigative look accented with his dry sense of humor the process starts with an idea.

When the show got greenlit for a second season, we already had a list of things that we wanted to talk about. Its stuff we pull out of the headlines, newspapers, news reports, magazines. You name it, Spurlock says. We have a list of 10 to 12 ideas that we say to the network that they are the ones we are thinking about.

The network selects ideas they like. Then Spurlock and his team pick the ones they want to do. Once theres a general agreement, research starts to flesh out the ideas. The eight topics that show the most potential go into production.

He knows his stories will be seen around the world through the global news channel, but the one key element he keeps in mind when selecting topics is finding stories that primarily impact an American audience. Many people told him that a story on immigration in the first season of the CNN series didnt affect most Americans, but he showed how it touches the country by looking at the food a person buys.

What I wanted to do with this series is to get people to connect the dots to see how they are affected by these stories, Spurlock says.

It was 10 years ago that Spurlock made national news with his Oscar-nominated film Super Size Me, a documentary about the ill effects he suffered eating a diet of only McDonalds fast food. His first TV series was as executive producer of the FX series 30 Days, where he embedded himself with his subjects for a month. Spurlock also directed the 3-D concert film One Direction: This Is Us.

Once the ideas are in place whether it be for film or TV the final product will almost always be different than what was originally discussed.

When I was making Super Size Me years ago, a filmmaker friend of mine gave me some advice. He said if the movie that I end up with is the exact same movie you envisioned from the beginning, then you didnt listen to anybody along the way, Spurlock says. Whenever we film an idea in a perfect world if everyone had rainbows and unicorns it would work out the most perfect way possible.

Then you start shooting and everything gets thrown out the window because everything you have written down doesnt happen. Things go in a very direction so you have to go with the way the story takes you.

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Morgan Spurlock begins second season as CNN's 'Inside Man'