What’s scarier — tracking down a terrorist or eating a month’s worth of Big Macs?

Morgan Spurlock put his life on the line for his first film. Before finishing his 30-day diet of only McDonald’s food and drink for the documentary “Super Size Me,” his body started to shut down. The diet, recommended by 0 out 10 doctors, would have killed him without medical intervention. Yet the seriousness of his subject was buffered by a goofy sense of humor.

 When he got the itch to make another revealing documentary, Spurlock upped the danger ante, and the subject got even more serious, but the humor never went away.

 “ ‘Super Size’ Me’ eventually played in about 75 countries around the world,” says Spurlock, with a big smile under his big mustache. “So whatever my next movie was going to be, I wanted it to be something that would deal with a global issue, not just an American problem.”

 The film, “Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?”, took the fearless Spurlock and his small crew to hot spots throughout the Middle East.

 “The initial idea was that I’m gonna go look for Osama bin Laden, and I’m gonna find out why we haven’t found him,” he says during a recent stop in Boston. “Then about two months into preproduction, my wife got pregnant, and that shifted my focus. It really became not just where is Osama bin Laden, and what kind of a world creates him, but what kind of a world am I bringing a child into.”

 Before heading off to Egypt, Israel, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, Spurlock begged and pleaded with his wife to let him go, promising that he wouldn’t go to Iraq and that he would be back in time for their child’s delivery.

 The new idea was to talk to people about bin Laden rather than actually search for him. So it became a sort of man-in-the-street film, with Spurlock roaming around asking people what they thought of bin Laden and where they guessed he might be. He eventually grew a beard and donned a white thobe, in order to fit in better.

 “I went over there with preconceived notions of my own that people wouldn’t want to talk to us,” he says. “I thought we would get people who were much more hostile to us, that would say, ‘There’s no way I’m talking to you, you American.’ But it was completely the inverse. People wanted to talk. Suddenly we were giving voice to the voiceless. We were talking to politicians in the beginning, but it became clear to me that the story is the regular folks, the people that you and I never get to hear from. I wanted to get inside their homes, get inside their heads, sit down and have real conversations.”

 Spurlock certainly met with some people who wanted nothing to do with Americans, or at least the American government. But he found ways to get closer to some of them.

 “I fasted during Ramadan,” he says of the month-long period when Muslims don’t eat during the daytime. “I didn’t make it for the full 30 days; I made it about 22 days. One of the guys there told me, ‘That’s good, but you’ve gotta make up those eight days.’

 “That did kind of endear me to a lot of people while we were trying to talk with them,” says Spurlock, “and opened them up to take us in.”

 To his credit, Spurlock doesn’t do any overt politicizing in the film. Though he has nothing good to say about terrorists, you won’t hear any Bush-bashing either. He lets people he’s interviewed do all of that.

 “I think you’d be hard pressed to find where my politics lie in anything that I’ve done,” he says of his previous film and his TV show “30 Days.” “I don’t like being told what to do, as my wife will attest. I like to make up my own mind, and I like people to make up their own mind. Hopefully that’s what happens with this movie.”

 He also hopes that viewers will stay till the end of the credits, at which point a phone number — 1-877-OSAMA08 — flashes up.

 “It’s the real thing,” he says. “If anyone has a tip on where we can find him, call that number. You never know. If we all work together, maybe we can find him. We’ll all split the $25 million.”

 Ed Symkus can be reached at esymkus@cnc.com.

Spurlock and his crew shot 900 hours of field footage and accumulated 100 hours of archival footage, then edited it all down to a 93-minute film.