Did you have an ending for the film if you'd caught him?
“Where if we caught him, we had a big party and I get a big $25 million Tiger Woods golf check? We talked about it, [cinematographer] Danny Marracino and myself, what would happen if we actually would get to find him or get to speak to him. A lot of people have asked what would you have said to him or what would you have asked him. I think the biggest thing for me would have been, I would have liked to have heard from him, ‘How does it end? How does this stop? How can the killing of innocent people end? How can all the hatred end? How can it just get to the point where there's peace and security for everybody?’ And maybe gotten a real answer. Maybe something real would have come out of that, with actual steps. Or, we might have just gotten a whole lot of crazy. Who knows? We would have gotten an answer. That would have been interesting.”
Were you worried he'd be found before you finished postproduction?
“They Found Osama Bin Laden. We Found Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden. No, that was a concern while we were making the film was would this guy be caught. And great. If he was caught, fantastic. That’s an awesome, wonderful thing. You can't be upset about that. Would it have completely ruined the film that we were making at the time? Possibly. It would have thrown a gigantic wrench into the plans, but we would have figured that out somehow. Even if they would have found him, I think a lot of the things people talk about over the course of the movie would remain the same because what you start to see over the course of the movie is, as much as Osama Bin Laden isn't in Egypt or Morocco or Saudi Arabia or the Palestinian territories or Afghanistan or Pakistan, he is in all of those places. The spirit of Osama Bin Laden, his ideology, the way that he thinks has infiltrated these countries, especially people who are in that minority of people that get all the airtime here in the United States.
I think what the film does a really good job of doing is starting to give a voice to that silent majority, the people that I think we don't give enough airtime to in America. I think the film does a great job of getting out of the two minute sound bites that we get on the news and painting a much different portrait of what life is like in the Middle East for a lot of these people on a daily basis.”
Was there a point that you knew nobody was close to finding Osama, you didn't have to worry?
“Yeah, personally I figured it had been so long and they hadn't found him and hadn't caught him that the chances of them finding him before we finished the film, odds were in our favor. It was the calculated risk that we took. As I said, had they found him, it would have been fantastic, but they didn't and hopefully they do.”
