Documentary
Cult-probing doco-maker Louis Theroux employed lateral thinking in his film on Scientology.
Alittle way into My Scientology Movie, British broadcaster Louis Theroux is up against the whitewashed wall of a Los Angeles backlot with a hand around his throat. That hand belongs to an actor auditioning for the role of David Miscavige, the sun-tanned, slick-haired Church of Scientology leader, who is alleged to have bullied and assaulted his underlings.
From the sideline, the church’s former chief enforcer, Marty Rathbun, is egging him on. “Dress him down!” he yells, eagerly. “Call him a four-eyed son of a bitch!” Poor Theroux takes a face-full of insults and the stifling grip, but looks only mildly perplexed. It’s just another day, another weird weekend, for the famous documentarian.
“It was awesome. It was brilliant. I loved it,” Theroux enthuses from
New York. The prolific journalist had spent years wondering how to make a documentary about the religion founded in the 1950s by pulp sciencefiction writer L Ron Hubbard, which has Tom Cruise and John Travolta in its exclusive membership. The only problem was getting the church hierarchy to agree to an interview. It would never be allowed. So, pinching an idea from
film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, Theroux decided to stage the worst allegations as re-enactments, with Rathbun on hand to ensure authenticity.
“It was different to how I would usually do things,” Theroux says. “Normally, I get access, I get inside, I spend time with the people I’m investigating. We build up a rapport, and you end up getting insight into the fundamental human qualities of people who think in a way that is dangerous or toxic.
“But here we had no access – nothing. The whole film hinged on a leap of faith to do with whether this process of using actors and encouraging Marty to recreate his version of events would actually work. When I saw Marty taking ownership of the process, and how the actors really pulled themselves into the role, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a revelation.’”
My Scientology Movie is Theroux’s first feature-length documentary after more than 50 celebrated television shows. In it, the action inside the church is rivalled by the intense verbal battles outside, with Scientology’s foot soldiers sent to tail, intimidate, threaten or otherwise silence Theroux and his sources.
There’s many a midnight showdown, territorial disputes over filming rights, in which Theroux fails to get a word out of the devotees. “I had always hoped they would do that,” he says of the harassment. “I knew that would be an important and revealing way of understanding what they do. So, when they started using their tried-and-tested tactics of sending people after us, I was greatly relieved.”
The film sees Theroux return to the US, which has been rather fruitful for him. Over the past 20 years, he has covered topics as diverse as neo-Nazis, the porn and infomercial industries, professional wrestling, the Westboro Baptist Church (known for its hate speech) and the criminal underworlds of at least three major cities. Yet he’s still no closer to figuring out why such bizarre, wonderful or sometimes dangerous subcultures take root there.
It’s a society “that is still, in a deep sense, experimental and almost utopian in nature”, he says. It began as “a cradle of religious extremism or religious non-conformism”.
“All these impulses took off, and you’ve got this cacophony of different cultures and different ways of doing things. [It’s] such a rich and fertile source of stories.”
But regardless of how outlandish the subject or how much it endangers his personal safety, Theroux approaches it with a poker-faced British sensibility that is always funny and always empathetic. No Jeremy Paxman-style interrogations here; he’s just probing for what makes his characters tick.
“I often see merit in what people say, and certainly in an emotional sense, because people aren’t animated by logic,” he says of his distinct style.
“You end up getting insight into the fundamental human qualities of people who think in a way that is dangerous or toxic.”
“All of us are guilty to some degree of going along in life with beliefs or practices either out of inertia or a sense of what we’ve learnt and been brought up in … It’s very rare that I don’t see some redeeming qualities in the stories I do.”
Louis Theroux: My Scientology Movie, BBC Knowledge and UKTV, Tuesday, April 4, 7.30pm.