I'm a maladapted social personality
who should be nowhere near a camera.
When do I start?
Scientologists, doomsday preppers, white supremacists.
There's nobody who is as good at getting people to self incriminate on camera
as the documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux.
And he is why I am here in London as the flag says because there is a small chance,
I'm betting, that maybe I can get him to self incriminate.
Just little bit.
All set?
Ready.
Lovely to meet you.
You too, Marc.
Can I just get you to go back to pre-career time. What kind of kid were you?
If I was to meet Louis maybe aged 13 what kind of kid would I be talking to?
Thirteen I was a pixie-ish little boy with a surprisingly small nose.
What happened?
I know, big time.
If you look at old photos, there's a slight look of 'oh this is what you looked like before the accident'.
But I was actually a bubbly, little, vivacious kid.
Who was probably able to hide the fact
that he was deep down quite anxious a lot of the time.
When you say anxious, what were the anxious pressure points for that kid?
Everything, really. And actually, I had been anxious for as long as I can remember.
From the ages of four onward.
The reason I ask about you as a 13 year old because I'm fascinated to know
whether you were the sort of kid
that other kids went to, to talk to beacuse
you do have that sort of face where other people just want to be able to tell you things.
I think what I had was an ability to navigate different cliques and I was a floater.
I don't know, does that sounds like?
It definitely sounds like a turd.
OK I was a different kind of floater than that.
No we are going to keep the first version of that. I love that you are giving me alternate
versions in the hope that I'll edit it, but it's not happening.
I was a great, big, brown floater.
Floating between different social groups.
And I think...
OK, you're me, because you have me psychoanalysing myself
and that's a dangerous spot to be in.
I never quite belonged that squarely, that completely, in any social group
but was comfortable in any of them.
So, I think that part of it there is a little bit of an analogy with what I do now
where I get along with people, get to know them.
But maybe in a slightly detached way.
Does that ever get lonely?
I think there were times.
You know, let me first of all say my parents are wonderful people and I'm very grateful
for everything they did for me.
Wow, they are about to get slammed in the next sentence I can feel that coming.
And, in addition to that, I wouldn't recommend the schooling that they chose for me, in certain respects.
So, they privately educated me in all boys schools.
You know, I've compared it, one of the things I've said
is that when I was at San Quentin, you know the prison in America where I did that film,
I recognised it.
It was like a boys boarding school, really, in many respects.
That feeling of being without female companionship of any kind,
being in this slightly Darwinian free-for-all, it can be a bit lonely.
Welcome back to TV Nation where we are standing on the fabled Madison Avenue
with our correspondent Louis Theroux.
Your first move into television was on a TV show called TV Nation
which was run by Michael Moore.
Who better for an image make-over, I was thinking, than the Ku Klux Klan?
Can you tell me about the job interview where you had to speak to Michael Moore for the first time?
Yes, a friend of mine called Chris Kelly said I think you'd be good on this so go along.
There's a few things you need to know about Michael before you go along.
Hi, I'm Michael Moore.
It's important that you should of seen some of Michael's work.
Well, I've seen his segments and stuff like that.
And also Roger and Me.
Well, I haven't seen that.
He said, well it's important you should have seen it.
It's your favourite film.
I was like, ok, I mean, you know, noted.
And I'm sure I can work with that, kind of thing.
So then, when the call came in, Chris said Michael is ready to see you
come along for an interview and
I hadn't seen Roger and Me.
I know where this is going.
So fine I went along.
And then came a time where he said, did you see the TV Nation pilot?
I was like, yeah I saw the pilot, it was great Michael.
Big fan of your work, in every respect, no bigger fan than I am.
He said, what about Roger and Me? Did you see that?
And then my heart sinks and I go yes, I saw it.
And with probably a glazed expression said, it's my favourite film.
And you got the job.
And I got the job.
In all your interviews and all your different documentaries
have you ever got Stockholm syndrome?
Where you are spending time with somebody and you know rationally their views on something are abhorrent
but you just find yourself liking them so much that it all starts to seem a bit reasonable.
Ok, here is what I'm going to say, is that that is actually that's part of the job.
And in a weird way it would be more surprising when I didn't get a degree of Stockholm syndrome.
In fact, it's in the DNA of what I do that I form more than the usual journalistic relationship
with the people that I spend time with.
I mean the Westboro Baptist Church, famous for being
fiercely, ferociously offensive and homophobic and then when you're with them, a lot of the time
the messages start to seem, not exactly normal but you can't be shocked.
If you're there for, sort of, two to three weeks
there's a point when numbness kicks in.
One of the recurring issues that comes up with your work is that at what point
are you humanising people and at what point are you just amplifying hate speech in some cases.
So, how do you navigate those moments? How do you decide, OK we're handing a phone to a lunatic here?
Well I think it's to do with the degree of power that the person you are talking to has
and the level of critical engagement that you bring to the encounter.
So with something like the Westboro Baptist Church, I challenged the views.
Do you know what I see? I see something who is having their cake and eating it.
The difference is, I know.
One of the things that made me feel OK about documenting them and giving airtime to their views
was that it would be self evident, especially if presented in the right way, that the views were totally idiotic.
That isn't to say that one out of a million might see it and think, hey that makes perfect sense.
But you can't really let your program and decisions be guided by the fact that there are
so many psychotic people out there.
Who pushes your buttons?
I found the Scientologists were quite good at pushing my buttons.
And in a way, I sort of think that if there is anything in Scientology Exhibit A would be how
good they are at pushing people's buttons.
When the Scientologists engaged with me and would get in your face
and say 'your lying, your wrong, we are calling the police.'
'Do you have a brain, can you read?'
You feel so wronged by this torrent of verbal attack
there were moments I thought I was going to start losing my temper
which is quite an uncharacteristic feeling for me in my work-mode.
My private life is different, pushing buttons in my private life, under-slept, children not eating their vegetables
throwing food onto the floor.
And now the Church of Scientology knows how to get to you.
All the Scientologists needed to do was turn up
and say 'I'm not going to eat my broccoli' and then throw it on the floor.
One of the films which I am actually most fascinated that you've made is where you revisited
one of your infamous celebrity episodes which was about Jimmy Savile
who was a very famous children's entertainer and then later revealed to be a notorious sex offender.
Why did you feel like that was a film you needed to make?
Having made this
documentary in 2000 when we met Jimmy where I spent a couple of weeks more or less
travelling around with him.
My name had been to some extent identified with him.
That program was very revealing in some ways
but did not, because I did not know
you know, the fact of him having been a serial predator.
We weren't able to, we did not say, you know
he's an out-and-out paedophile, I didn't know that at the time.
When the full sordid
truth was unveiled after he died
I actually sort out all the reports after his offending was uncovered.
Every institution which we ever did work at was required to do a deep dive, a deep investigation
of what happened and give full any anonymity to any victims or alleged victims
who wanted to speak.
And it was just astonishing and upsetting and awful.
It's one thing to read a newspaper article but to read the forensic level of detail in those reports.
It just hit me quite hard.
I just sort of felt it was extraordinary that he had got away with so much for so long.
And wanted to delve deeper into how that had taken place.
He molested, raped, abused hundreds of people and at the same time
he was someone, when he was alive, I called a friend which I still struggle with.
One of the biggest things that has changed since you've been making TV
has been the rise of social media and people love to Tweet during your films, I've noticed.
How do you think it changes the way it's received?
I think Twitter is a really odd medium for me,
because so much of it is currying favour with your tribe.
The whole idea of having opinions which is so valued on Twitter.
A lot of what I try and do is almost not have an opinion.
Or at least undercut, or challenge, a certain perception
or see it in a different way, or make it more dimensional.
The aim, really, is to show how poisonous views exist.
What the psychology is and what the social dynamic that allows it to happen.
Louis Theroux, thank you.
Thanks very much.