Page 3 Profile: Morgan Spurlock, film maker

(Getty images)

Morgan Spurlock’s looking less liverish these days.

Indeed. It’s almost a decade since millions of us watched the director vomiting in a McDonald’s car park in Super Size Me, the documentary that saw him eat exclusively from the fast food chain for a month. He’s got bigger fish to fry now, namely One Direction, who he followed for almost a year for the movie One Direction: This is Us.

What’s that deafening noise?!

It’s the scream of millions of dangerously excited teenagers. Spurlock’s movie gives an access-all-areas look into the lives of the members of the boy band, including footage from before their appearance on The X-Factor which started it all. After unsuccessful bids to snap up jobs directing similar fly-on-the-wall flicks for Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, Spurlock lobbied for the chance to follow the pop group around, to the envy of fans across the globe.

How does one reach such giddy heights of director-dom?

A man has to work hard for the chance to engorge his liver over a month and follow teenagers around. His mum taught him to think outside the box, enrolling him in ballet classes and writing camps for kids. He graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1993. He went on to present pro beach volleyball and extreme sports on TV, before creating I Bet You Will for MTV, a show which saw contestants licking guacamole off people’s feet for money.

From licking feet to One Direction, what a leap!

He’s pretty excited about the access he’s been granted. “This is probably the closest I’ll get in my whole lifetime to seeing anything similar to Beatlemania,” the director said. “We were in Mexico City and there were 5,000 people camping outside the hotel. I mean this is such a massive global phenomenon and it’s only growing. It was incredible to witness and see.” I think I can hear John Lennon spinning in his grave…