Threats don’t stop satire
British filmmaker mocks Scientology in new movie & knew he’d face pushback
BRITISH documentarian Louis Theroux was in his pajamas making pancakes for his kids one morning last year when there was a knock at the door.
“The police came in and said, ‘There’s been a threat. Someone wants to do you harm. They’ve seen your film and they really want to hurt you. They called the Church of Scientology, and then the church called us on your behalf.’ ”
“That was the weirdest thing that happened,” the puckish Theroux says of the encounter. “It could either be true, or it could be the church just finding another way to get to me.”
The incident did not come as a complete surprise; Theroux, 46, had known he was signing up to be harassed when he made “My Scientology Movie,” which had been released in the UK shortly beforehand. Scientology is nearly as famous for its vicious campaigns against its detractors as it is for its A-list acolyte, Tom Cruise.
Theroux’s doc follows in the footsteps of another Scientology exposé, Alex Gibney’s 2015 film “Going Clear,” but takes a very different approach to the controversial religion, started in 1953 by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard. More satire than straightforward chronicle, this movie sees Theroux — claiming he’s been denied any access to the church itself — holding auditions for actors to re-create particularly chilling moments in Scientology history. They include a leaked promotional video starring an over-the-top Cruise, and one ex-member’s description of an alleged violent incident in a church location ominously known as “the Hole.”
Meanwhile, Theroux is followed and visited by unidentified passers-by with video cameras — for what he finds out is the church allegedly making a documentary on him.
“Part of me is flattered they’re taking such an interest,” he says. “I like the idea of [church leader] David Miscavige and Cruise in the cutting room picking shots of me. I’m curious about how I could be characterized most unkindly.”
The church has already slung plenty of dirt at Theroux’s main on-screen conspirator, Marty Rathbun, once the high-ranking inspector general of Scientol- ogy. Now an ex-member, Rathbun schools Theroux in some of the church’s bizarre psychological exercises — one sees the documentarian screaming himself hoarse at an ashtray to “stand up!” — and his own experiences with Miscavige’s reportedly abusive behavior.
But Rathbun, in the film, draws the line at including a portrait of Hubbard in the reenactments, leading Theroux to wonder whether he’s still partially in thrall to the religion. “He’s since denounced the world of anti-Scientology as being more cultlike than Scientology,” Theroux says. “It’s confusing for the many people who view him as having helped them get out of it. I have very warm feelings for Marty, for how much he put into the film, but the bottom line is — he’s a very complicated dude.”
Even at its most unsettling, Theroux says his time spent rattling the Scientologists’ cage was a walk in the park compared to his usual beat.
“My day job is doing hourlong [television] documentaries,” says Theroux, who got his start as a correspondent on Michael Moore’s 1994 show “TV Nation” and now works at the BBC, which also produced this film. “I’m in the middle of a threepart series about crime in America: There’s one about murder in Milwaukee, sex trafficking in Houston and the opioid epidemic in the Midwest. So while it was quite intense, this movie was actually a bit of a holiday.”