Trailer: Louis Theroux live on stage
Filmmaker Louis Theroux will tour Australia in September.
PT0M38S http://www.theage.com.au/action/externalEmbeddedPlayer?id=d-4bzwt 620 349 March 14, 2016What's the trick? When other journalists interview him, says Louis Theroux, that's what they want to find out. How does he persuade the afflicted, the wicked and the bizarrely deluded to let him into their lives? How does this lanky, middle-aged version of Harry Potter find the courage to ask questions that would get tougher reporters thrown out on their ears?
I recently caught up with a podcast he did with comedian Richard Herring in front of an audience; somewhere in the middle, Herring realised he had stopped asking questions and was telling his guest all about his own childhood. "I was just Louis Therouxed!" he groaned. How does Theroux do that?
I meet Louis Theroux, who is making his first visit to Australia in September, in a coffee queue. His determination to start the day with coffee is familiar from his shows; so is the way he says with a certain emphasis "How are you doing?" as we sit down with our respective caffeine fixes. Louis Theroux in person is, in fact, much the same as Louis Theroux on screen: there is no trick.
![Louis Theroux says it would be ''quite weird'' to show disgust at the people he's interviewing.](http://web.archive.org./web/20160417153257im_/http://images.theage.com.au/2016/04/11/7339156/Article%20Lead%20-%20wide1007923917go3azfimage.related.articleLeadwide.729x410.go3b2l.png1460785310380.jpg-620x349.jpg)
Louis Theroux says it would be ''quite weird'' to show disgust at the people he's interviewing. Photo: Carsten Windhorst
"Sometimes people think I'm sort of a Machiavelli who is thinking 'how can I disarm people? I know, I'll create a persona, I'll get some spectacles and when I meet you I'll say how are you doing? And I will be very unassuming and polite and never get angry'."
But there was no plan, he says. "In fact I am genuinely a bit confused about the world, a little bit bumbling. I am genuinely slightly vague and chaotic in my habits. For good or ill, you know."
Theroux's chosen cafe is right at the portals of the BBC, where he has been making programs for more than 20 years. It is sometimes suggested that he could break into American television but he can't see the point: at the BBC, he said recently, "I can already write my own ticket". He actually began his pursuit of the weird and wacky in the United States, where he worked on Michael Moore's TV Nation as a young roving reporter armed only with a good degree in history from Oxford and an English public school accent. And the name Theroux, of course, which had already been made famous, at least in a literary way, by his father: travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux.
![Louis Theroux in <i>My Scientology Movie</i>.](http://web.archive.org./web/20160417153257im_/http://images.theage.com.au/2016/04/12/7341631/Article%20Lead%20-%20narrow1007923917go4bi4image.related.articleLeadNarrow.353x0.go3b2l.png1460785310380.jpg-300x0.jpg)
Louis Theroux in My Scientology Movie. Photo: Supplied
"My guilty fear," he mutters, "is that what I'm doing probably anyone could do. And that I just got a lot of lucky breaks."
Well, that obviously isn't true: Theroux's inclination to like people, to find the humanity and humour in a lot of people he might not be expected to like at all, amounts to a televisual superpower. "Sometimes I wish I was a bit more decisive, a bit more take-charge kind of person," he muses. "There is something in me that is very comfortable with going with the flow and sort of slip-streaming behind bigger personalities. That is what you see me doing in the shows a lot of the time, while also trying to sort of figure them out."
Except that there is nothing small about Theroux's personality: a given documentary may be about porn stars or people who are about to die or autistic children, all of which are interesting subjects, obviously, but we watch the shows because they're his. He is our friend, our fellow traveller, our representative in telly la-la land. So in a sense, they are about him, aren't they?
![Louis Theroux in <i>By Reason of Insanity</i>.](http://web.archive.org./web/20160417153257im_/http://images.theage.com.au/2016/04/13/7345163/Article%20Lead%20-%20narrow1007923917go3c09image.related.articleLeadNarrow.353x0.go3b2l.png1460785310380.jpg-300x0.jpg)
Louis Theroux in By Reason of Insanity. Photo: ABC Publicity
He looks at his coffee. "Well, you know, I'm going to politely disagree with that," he says. "They're not all about me. In a sense I don't think I reveal that much of myself in them. You see me a lot, but a lot is held back. Part of my job is to be a foil to the people I'm among, but if the focus is on me too much then I think I'm not doing my job."
The essentials of a Theroux program actually haven't changed much since his TV Nation days. He sets out to call on some community of oddballs or people in extremis, embeds himself and then draws them out. Early programs focused on the wacky: the Weird Weekends, where he met amateur wrestlers, survivalists and porn actors, were followed by the "Louis Theroux Meets…" profiles, where he spent time with public eccentrics such as the boxer Chris Eubank and the thoroughly peculiar, subsequently disgraced TV personality Jimmy Savile. Each one turned on the expectation that he would somehow hang his subject out to dry; the satisfaction lay in the fact that he never did, even while watching little girls belting out home-grown songs about white supremacy.
"Would that not be quite weird, to be talking to someone and show disgust?" he says, brow creasing. "I'm not quite sure how I would do my job and do that. The thing is I am there trying to understand people."
Over the past decade, his emphasis has shifted away from the merely wacky to worlds that are customarily closed to outsiders bearing cameras. Theroux has talked to hospice patients facing imminent death, to transgendered children and their parents, to sex offenders in a Los Angeles jail. Most recently he has made a theatrical documentary about Scientology called, with the sort of play between irony and innocence we expect of Theroux, My Scientology Movie. For this he was obliged to take a different tack, because no signed-up Scientologist would talk to him; instead, he worked with disaffected members of the church, auditioned actors to re-enact life in the cult's "Gold Base" and filmed the so-called "squirrel-busters" sent to stalk him with their own cameras.
To be on the hate-list of a secretive organisation strikes me as worrying, especially for someone with a wife and children, but Theroux says he was much more frightened when he made a series of programs about dangerous pets.
"When you've been pursued by a chimpanzee, a Scientologist with a camera is as nothing," he says. "I mean that quite seriously. I'm more scared of animals than of humans. With humans you can establish some kind of rapport. A chimpanzee doesn't really know that you're filming, might not know that he's going to get in trouble if he bites your nose off, might be having a bad day. I'm not in any physical danger from somebody wielding a camera. In fact it is my job to be on camera, so it's like throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch. That's where he lives. I live on camera."
How far Louis Theroux is a creature of the camera is an interesting question. His trademark move is to ask questions that might be obvious, but that most of us would avoid for exactly that reason.
"I feel like, if there's an elephant in the room, I'd really like to start off by introducing the elephant," he once said. It seems clear, however, that he can get away with asking an amiable porn actor to show him his penis, as he did in the Porn episode of Weird Weekends, for example, largely because this is television entertainment: "Definitely, definitely," agrees Theroux. "There's no question. It was clearly a cheeky question but it was a performative sort of space with the camera there and a few other people around who were in on the joke. I had just had a naked photo done, as part of the agency process. It didn't feel that kind of outlandish."
But then he tells me how he did, in fact, subsequently interview a retired porn performer for a book and asked him to do the same thing. There was a moment's silence, he says, before his interviewee dropped his pants. "I remember him standing there and me just sort of looking at his cock and balls and going 'uh huh'." It was to test the man's stated conviction that sex wasn't private, he says, "but it was also almost to test my own mettle … It was an interesting example of me thinking 'am I just a creation of the TV camera, or can I still be that sort of inquisitorial imp in a small setting and ask borderline inappropriate questions? I sort of felt I had to do it when it was just me and him. Do you think I proved anything?" He smiles ruefully and shakes his head at himself. "Not really."
Why people are so willing to be "Louis Therouxed" is sometimes a puzzle – what did the Conservative former front-bencher Ann Widdecombe have to gain, for example, by sharing with him the verses she had written about her cats? – but he insists there are no tricks to that either.
"It's certainly not a sort of bait and switch. We show them the earlier programs, say it's a first-person documentary. I think the feeling is that we give people a fair shake and, by and large, people are OK with the way they are portrayed."
People who know their lifestyles are controversial are keen to "get their world view across"; for the patients in the shows about people living with dementia or autism, "I think there is a feeling of 'I'm going through something astonishing and complicated and traumatic and it's actually quite helpful to let people know what this is like'."
He hesitates to tell me – "this is probably hugely self-serving" – but the dementia patients were apparently buoyed up by the cameras, interviews and excitement; for life prisoners in Among the Sex Offenders, it was a reprieve from boredom; for the dying, it is a chance to leave a considered memorial. "So there is a variety of reasons, but sometimes things that you or the viewers might see as embarrassing or very personal, for the people involved it can actually be quite liberating."
And what is it like for him to talk to the dying? "There's a feeling of privilege," he says. "As a healthy person you know you are speaking to someone in an extreme state. There is a feeling of almost unbearable intimacy in that something very private is taking place, but, along with the sadness, there is this feeling of a restoration of faith in the way in which we care for others."
The program about sex offenders was more troubling. "There's a feeling when you're among people who have done something extremely awful, like molested their own kids, of 'am I right even to be here doing this? What am I hoping to achieve by talking to these people?' You answer that question for yourself, but it doesn't go away." He tried not to "over-emotionalise" with that particular child molester, but it wasn't easy.
"I'm a journalist but, clearly, I'm still a human being … it is a very difficult thing to get right because he is under no obligation to talk to me, but I also feel there is something we can learn, as a society, from what he has to tell me."
Theroux refers to himself several times as a journalist, which suggests he shies away from thinking of himself as a personality or small-screen celebrity, but he has admitted to enjoying it when people recognise him. And he wouldn't be doing what he is doing in Australia – hosting evenings where he talks about his work, answers questions, shows clips – if it were not for the fact that the television entity called Louis Theroux is an event in himself. To meet people who have enjoyed his work is "amazing".
He hasn't been to Australia, so this was an excuse. And he thinks it will be fun. "My experience when I watch my old shows or bits of them is that it feels very precious, like listening to a song you like a lot but haven't heard in a while," he says. "(And) I think, taken together, they say something about life and the human experience. I'm not sure what it is, but I plan to find out."
Louis Theroux tours Australia from September 22-October 2, including Melbourne's Hamer Hall on September 25 (two shows) and Plenary on September 26, and Sydney's State Theatre on September 27 and 28 and October 2. Tickets: louistherouxlive.com