There’s producing, and then there’s producing. Sometimes, being the producer of a small, independent film just means helping to raise money and finding the right people from whom to borrow equipment. Other times it means putting together a logistical package to rival what went into making The English Patient.

To make Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, which opens here on Friday (May 16), producer Stacey Offman had to set up field units—with local producers, translators, and camera and sound people—in a half-dozen or so countries. In the documentary, director Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame) travels to places where bin Laden is said to have been hanging out.

“It was certainly the most challenging thing I’ve done yet,” Offman says from her office in New York City. The Big Apple move itself, five years ago, was another step into the unknown for the Haligonian, who had spent the previous 10 years in Vancouver—five of them working on shows like Kink and Celluloid Dreams for Paperny Films.

Two years ago, Spurlock (and another Osama producer, Jeremy Chilnick) hired her to produce the similarly quizzical What Would Jesus Buy?, a scabrous musical look at the commercialization of Christmas. That documentary followed performance artist Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping through a bunch of Midwestern malls. In the new film, Spurlock goes much further, although many of its root problems are still faith-based.

“I was in on the project from the mere idea of it, and we were able to home in on the countries—many of which you don’t even see in the film—to map out Morgan’s journey. It was a massive undertaking on two levels: there was the security-management consideration, making sure we had Morgan protected by people who had extensive knowledge of those regions; and we needed a lot of research done by teams of associate producers so we could hit the ground running in each place. The list of international hires, apart from the crew we started with, was somewhere around the 200 mark. We were like the UN of filmmakers.”

The blue-helmet approach didn’t quite work in several European visits that never made it to the doc’s final cut.

“It was tricky, because we were not just following bin Laden’s trail but looking at the influence and spread of al-Qaeda, which, since the invasion of Iraq, now pops up in just about every country. Obviously, places like Afghanistan and Pakistan are high-risk and precarious, but that was where we wanted to put our emphasis.”

One theme of the film, and its most subversive element, is its questioning of the so-called War on Terror. This officially sanctioned waste of resources is revealed in glimpses of the desolate rubble of Afghanistan and the empty caves of Tora Bora, where one local warlord—excuse me, government official—wants to build a lucrative amusement park.

More dark ironies are evident in Saudi Arabia, America’s putative ally in the region, where many students and worshippers are taught to despise the West.

“We were there for about two weeks, and it was definitely a small miracle to even get access. Very few American journalists are given media visas, and we spent a lot of time building relationships to make that happen. We found a local company that was willing to sponsor us and was really on-board with what we were doing, so we were able to finesse our way in. But it wasn’t easy. There was a recent incident with a BBC journalist who was shot in the street there.”

(She didn’t work with her mentor, David Paperny, on his related film, Confessions of an Innocent Man, about the arrest and torture of an Anglo-Canadian teacher for “terrorist” activities.)

Offman says Spurlock was able to get into many countries based on his reputation as a fair-minded fellow. She produced an episode of his 30 Days TV series that featured discussions with Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Michigan; apparently, this had notable resonance in the larger Arab world. Naturally, the team didn’t approach officials in Islamabad or Kabul—nor reps of the U.S. army—with something called Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?

“No,” she says with a chuckle. “We called it Untitled Morgan Spurlock Project or something like that. He’s known as a genuine populist, and we weren’t attached to any network, but we were very open about it dealing with American foreign policy. It helped that Morgan has a big fan base among soldiers, mostly for Super Size Me. Really, this story is about forging personal relationships, aside from official policy. And that’s also how we made the film.”

Offman is currently working on Faster, a documentary about a man subsisting on fruit juice to cure himself of a rare disease. After that, she hopes to break into directing feature films as well as producing them. By now she has learned that fiction is neither stranger nor much more difficult than truth.