Gotta Get Theroux This

by Louis Theroux

  ‘I love that,’ Larry said. ‘A film within a film. We could have a casting call for actors to play David Miscavige.’

  This wasn’t exactly what I’d meant and, intrigued as I was, I also worried that it seemed prankish, unmoored from any documentary reality. But Larry was off and running. What about instead of being one film within a film, there were several, each in a different mode? A religious epic. A sci-fi film. A Miscavige biopic. At this point, my head was starting to spin as I tried to keep up with Larry’s runaway vision. But I’d spent enough time in Hollywood by now that I knew I should mask my confusion. ‘Yes, I love it,’ I said. ‘Wow, interesting. Ha ha ha!’

  One August day, I took a break from some filming I was doing in the South Central dog pound and Ubered up to some shiny offices in Century City, where Larry, Simon and I spent a morning interviewing editors. We talked about the re-enactments and the idea of doing things differently. It was becoming real and I was in equal measures excited and scared. A few weeks after that, I took off with the family to my dad’s house on Cape Cod for a short break, and it was there that I received a message from Simon. It said simply, ‘Larry’s out.’

  I called back straight away. ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘He doesn’t think you’re on board with doing things in another way. I think he felt you were maybe a little unenthusiastic.’

  ‘Did it seem that way to you when we were interviewing editors?’

  ‘I’ve got to say it didn’t. So I don’t know what’s going on. Maybe there’s another reason. I don’t know.’

  I sent a message to Larry, hoping to change his mind. ‘I am absolutely on board with another way of working . . . For me this is all about stretching myself and using different muscles.’ But it didn’t work. We were now nearly a year into our development phase and still without a director.

  Chapter 28

  My Scientology Movie

  It was March 2014 – more than six months after Larry left – before we shot our first scene on the film. Several times I thought about abandoning the project altogether. If I could have pushed a button that would have made the entire idea and any memory of it disappear, I probably would have done. The knowledge that there was another team also pursuing the subject didn’t help. Alex Gibney, the director behind numerous Oscar-winning documentaries, had optioned Lawrence Wright’s book, Going Clear. HBO was paying for his film. It was likely to make a big impact. It was like spying Amundsen and his huskies speeding towards the South Pole while you’re still walking around Millets looking for thermal socks.

  In October, the family took an RV trip, driving from Los Angeles across Southern California to Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. I felt like the quintessential American dad piloting the vehicle, which was the size of an aircraft carrier and about as manoeuvrable. It was the kind of holiday I’d dreamed of taking as a child, in the years when my brother and I would spend our summers going mental sequestered in our dad’s house while he worked and we stared at the static on the portable black and white television. Now I was making it real for my children, even though bits kept falling off the RV. There was an aerial on the roof for the flat-screen TV that went up and down with a hand crank but it got stuck in its ‘up’ position. Then I had a fight with the metal rods that supported the fold-out awning. I figured I’d be driving a metal carcass by the time we got back – the mechanical equivalent of a whale skeleton.

  In Southwestern Utah we found an RV hook-up on the edge of Bryce Canyon National Park. During the day we hiked the trails, admiring the hoodoos – mysterious red rock formations carved by the wind that looked sometimes like totem poles or manikins or erect ginger roots. At night, when the temperature plummeted to near freezing, we roasted marshmallows, and after the boys were in bed Nancy and I watched a documentary that had been causing a sensation at festivals, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing.

  We digested it in half-hour chunks over three successive nights. It told the story of a wave of mass killings in Indonesia in the late sixties, doing so from the perspective of the killers themselves who were shown on sound stages directing scenes that re-enacted and celebrated the tortures and murders they had performed. Bizarre and shocking, it struck me as a new way of thinking about non-fiction storytelling. One had the sense, by the end, that the re-enactments had become an almost redemptive technique, allowing the principal culprit Anwar Congo to confront his crimes and, seemingly, think about them in a different way.

  Later, I discovered there are precursors to this approach – Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence; Rithy Panh’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine; Punishment Park by Peter Watkins. Joshua Oppenheimer himself has pointed to the films of the French director Jean Rouch – which involve semi-scripted self-re-enactments – as an influence.

  Watching the film in the RV, I thought about a different way of seeing the re-enactments that Larry Charles had talked about for the Scientology film. Instead of spoofs of genres, or exercises in poking fun at Church practices, or simply ways of visualizing Church practices and events, the process of making the re-enactments would be the point. They would work as a kind of therapeutic role-play for our contributors, bringing their memories to life, forcing them to examine their own consciences, which in turn would allow me to interrogate their choices.

  A month or so later, back in LA, I received a call from Simon saying he had another director in mind, John Dower, a respected veteran of several theatrical documentaries, including the definitive film about Britpop, Live Forever. John was intrigued by Scientology, which he described as being like a religion invented by Thomas Pynchon, and he liked the film-within-a-film idea. Still, he had some misgivings. He wasn’t explicit on the subject but I supposed they were the understandable ones of someone used to running his own ship jibbing at the idea of crewing with a co-captain whose name and likeness were carved into the vessel.

  He wrote a treatment setting out his vision for the film. It would be a documentary about me, Louis Theroux, as I attempted to make a fictional feature film about Scientology. The ‘Louis Theroux’ in the treatment seemed a different person to the one I’d known – well, been – for forty-plus years. He was like a made-up character. I couldn’t get my head round the concept. I didn’t want to make a fictional film about Scientology. I bridled at the idea that I wasn’t a co-author of the actual ‘outer’ documentary.

  We had a slightly awkward conference call. He was jibbing. I was bridling.

  John left the project. Then he returned. Then he left. This hokey-cokey dance went on for several weeks, in-out, in-out, until I sent an email not exactly shaking it all about, but making it plain that I wasn’t trying to replicate my TV documentaries and that I was as keen as he was to try a different approach. I threw in the words ‘improvised re-enactments’ and ‘therapeutic role play’ for good measure. I don’t know if those exact phrases did the trick but John came on board again – this time for good – and we settled into a concept in which we were making a film about Scientology, more or less as equals, that would use re-enactments and the Hollywood process of casting, location scouting, directing, improvisation to shine a light on Hollywood’s sci-fi religion.

  Selfie with my Scientology director, John Dower.

  The collaboration with John, while it had its bumps, in the end turned out to be more fun and more rewarding than I could have imagined.

  Filming took place over the best part of a year. A few days here and there, possibly twenty or so shoot days in all.

  At the beginning – and to an extent all the way through – there remained unknowns about how the re-enactments would work. One of the few consistent features was the feeling that they would hinge on the participation of an ex-Scientologist named Marty Rathbun. He featured in almost all the coverage of Scientology that had appeared in the wake of the wave of defections starting in 2004. At one time he’d been the Inspector General for the entire church, responsible for enforcing orthodox practice at all the Scientology churches and missions – t
hough Scientology disputed this, claiming he’d been a lowlier figure. He’d audited – Scientology-speak for counselled – celebrity Scientologist Tom Cruise (maybe you’ve heard of him?). Marty had worked closely with David Miscavige for years: they’d been brothers-in-arms of a spiritual sort, but they’d fallen out. Marty had fled the Church and now he was a spearhead of anti-Scientology. In my mind, Marty would be our Anwar Congo: the troubled and charismatic warrior still processing complicated feelings.

  John had made contact with Marty. When asked about the idea of taking part in another Scientology documentary, he said he was burned out on the subject. Then John mentioned the re-enactments idea, and Marty was sold.

  On our first day of filming, a bright spring day in Los Angeles, I drove to the airport in a car rigged with a piece of scaffolding that carried a fabric sunshade and a couple of cameras, including a huge one that was shooting back at me. It felt like proper show business. ‘Don’t go over forty miles an hour,’ John said. ‘Got it,’ I replied, and it was only a half hour later, distracted by the rig and the excitement, that I drove onto the freeway by mistake. At high speed the sunshade acted like a wing, I could feel the lift – it was either going to detach and kill a random passer-by or, best case scenario, we would take off and travel to our destination by air. But we made it, and I picked up Marty – the camera apparatus meant we couldn’t open the front doors and had to crawl inside – and on the drive to Marty’s motel we chatted in a friendly way as we filmed. In the motel room, I read him a letter from the Church in which they declined to take part in my documentary.

  Marty was polite enough, intelligent and self-possessed – in his fifties, going grey, a little paunchy, he had the air of a high school basketball coach whose life hasn’t gone to plan. He wore rumpled shirts with lots of pockets, like a fly fisherman, though I can’t recall if he was wearing one that day, and behind an apparently laid-back exterior was a contradictory figure: part spiritual seeker, part backyard brawler.

  John and I had agreed that, while we had no clear idea how the re-enactments concept would develop, a first step would be to film – as Larry had once proposed – a series of auditions for the role of David Miscavige, with Marty sitting in and offering input and direction. The day after the chat at the motel, at a studio in an anonymous stretch in the west of the city, we sat in a windowless room for several hours as one by one thirty or so young actors performed lines from the Scientology leader’s only network-TV interview, on the American current-affairs programme Nightline in 1992.

  In footage from the show, Miscavige – then around thirty-four years old, with Vanilla Ice hair and shoulder pads – gives off a steely intensity as he attempts to explain the basic concept of the Church – no easy task given the vagueness and calculated mystery of its doctrine – and tries to quash allegations of dirty tricks that had recently appeared in a Time cover story, subtitled ‘The Cult of Greed’. ‘Scientology. The word means study of life,’ he says, with surprisingly broad unpolished Philadelphia vowels. ‘Study of knowledge. And that’s what it is. It takes up all areas of life itself. Things that are integral. Maxims that are related to life and very existence.’

  Fresh-faced and vulnerable, several of them visibly nervous, the young actors came across as touchingly eager to please, offering different reads, placing their trust in us. They seemed to embody the age-old Hollywood dream of making it and it wasn’t hard to imagine them as exactly the kind of starry-eyed hopefuls that Scientology has traditionally sought to recruit, with promises of show business connections and the prospect of becoming the next Tom Cruise. From the off, Marty lit up and took control, feeding lines, offering suggestions on how to embody the right level of contained rage and righteousness.

  He encouraged the actors to improvise foul-mouthed abuse, with either him or me standing in to take it. ‘Get personal. Dress the guy down. Call him a four-eyed son-of-a-bitch cocksucker. Louder.’ He told an actor to shove me against a wall – it was oddly bracing – and could barely conceal his pleasure at the spectacle of play-acted physical violence. ‘This is really good,’ he muttered.

  During all this, I also plied him with questions about his involvement in the Church, how it was that he’d stayed in for so long and become an adjunct to a regime that was so oppressive. What was it about the beliefs and about Miscavige’s personality that had appealed to him? He described the intoxicating danger of an all-encompassing religious vision, and there was a piece of him that still tapped into that thrill of being part of a Spartan band of holy warriors. All of this flowed naturally from the process of the auditions.

  After that day, I was confident the re-enactments idea – though we didn’t know where it was leading or how it would pay off – was a goer.

  Holding e-meter cans during filming.

  For the rest of that year, every few months, Marty would fly out to film short sessions with our actors. As we became comfortable around each other, we settled into a kind of 48 Hours-style double act. I was Eddie Murphy: puckish and immature. He was Nick Nolte, the grizzled vet who was too old for this shit. Still, he seemed to enjoy aspects of our time together. It was clear he was obsessed with Scientology – and, in particular, David Miscavige – and he enjoyed giving vent to his obsession.

  ‘Ultimately, it’s as if he literally, in his warped mind, is begging me to end all this for him,’ he said. ‘He knows I’m the truth, man. And that is the scariest thing in the world to him.’

  Marty believed that it was his leaving, in 2004, that snapped Miscavige out of an alleged spiral of abuse. He said it was possible that the secret base he and Miscavige worked at could have ‘gone full Jonestown’ if Marty hadn’t blown the whistle and spoken to the papers. He maintained that Miscavige was obsessed with him. This may well have been true. It was documented that a committed band of Scientologists had filmed and harassed Marty and his wife for months on end after he left the Church. They called themselves ‘the squirrel busters’ and wore goofy hats with cameras on top of them. It was commonly assumed they were operating on orders from Miscavige.

  A part of Marty still viewed Scientology as valuable. He saw aspects of the tech as therapeutic and insightful, and he seemed to pine for the world-saving mission and the paramilitary dedication of the Sea Org; knocking heads, pushing people around, shouting and motivating. In filming with our actors, it was a little as though Marty had been gifted a small cult to imprint his spiritual thinking upon.

  A month or two after the Miscavige auditions we held another casting call for the role of Tom Cruise. This time we enlisted the help of an ex-Scientologist named Marc Headley – he’d been audited by Cruise when he was still inside, living at the Church’s secret base in the California desert. Then, with our Miscavige and Cruise now cast, we took them, and twelve or so other young actors, and put them through a day of Scientology ‘drills’ on a hot soundstage in an area of LA called Silverlake. This – we hoped – would be a way of exploring what Scientologists actually do: how they instil the ultra-disciplined, glazed-eyed attitude that is the hallmark of the true LRH believer. But it was also something Marty had suggested – he presided over the instruction – and the day turned out to be revealing not only for the content of the teaching itself, which mainly involved taking turns staring at each other in pairs and shouting abuse, but also for the way it led to an unintended blow-up between Marty and me. He objected to my suggestion that we follow Scientology protocol and applaud an imaginary portrait of Hubbard at the end of the day. ‘I advise you guys not to do it,’ he said. ‘I’m not participating in that shit.’ And walked off in a huff.

  That Marty found me irritating created a helpful dynamic for the film and prevented it becoming too cuddly. I tried not to take it personally, and truthfully it wasn’t just about me. He would often say he was fed up with the whole subject of Scientology and especially the world of anti-Scientology: the usual suspects of the prominent critics making claims about abuse and cult tactics. ‘I’ve graduated from Scientology. I
’m done.’ His position reminded me of William Shatner, in the famous comedy sketch that showed him telling attendees at a Star Trek convention to ‘get a life’. Marty didn’t want his existence defined by his time in the Church and resented the role he’d been assigned as champion of the cause and official scourge of Scientology. He’d recently remarried, and he and his wife had adopted a young infant. The child seemed to represent a rebirth for Marty: a part of his life that was untouched by anything to do with Scientology.

  The Church pushback began not long after the first round of auditions with Marty.

  Mainly it came in the form of sheaves of legal correspondence from Scientology lawyers. The gist of the letters was that I was a religious bigot; that I was basing my reporting on unfounded allegations by a handful of apostates; and would I do the same sort of reporting about the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby? They heaped scorn on the idea of using Marty Rathbun, a ‘disgruntled apostate’, to help cast our actor for the role of Pope Dave. I had the impression they might be OK with our doing re-enactments if we had a more suitable casting director, which was an unexpected development – the idea that they might seriously think about coming on as collaborators. But my main reaction was to wonder how they knew about the auditions and the presence of Marty, and to speculate whether it was possible we had a Scientology mole on our team.

  I wrote back making the point that: 1) I wasn’t a religious bigot; 2) there was an open invitation to any Scientologists who wished to speak to us and help with casting; and 3) yes, I probably would do the same story about Archbishop Justin Welby if he was dogged by multiple allegations of physical assault and human trafficking.

  This was all true as far as it went, although – with respect to the Welby question – I had to acknowledge that Anglicanism probably was less intriguing than a UFO religion with Tom Cruise and a secret base. Whether it’s bigoted to find a sci-fi writer founding a religion in the mid-twentieth century weirder than a Galilean preacher in the outer reaches of the Roman Empire is, I guess, a matter of opinion.