Louis Theroux Quotes
Journalist
I sometimes get accused of being 'faux-naive,' but for me, it's really just about getting down to the basics of something.
There is no religion that has a monopoly on bigotry.
I think Donald Trump's had a pattern of leaping on the bandwagon of anything that he feels will further his candidacy, and if that means sowing more fear and paranoia and playing into a kind of xenophobic populist strain, then that's what he will do.
There is no shame is being ambivalent about almost everything in your life.
Most people feel that they are the heroes of their own lives and that they're good people. So if they're in a crisis, they feel an understandable urge to set out their own version of events.
I never misrepresent my position - you've got to be strong enough to make the argument and marshal the case.
I tell people I live in Harlesden in north-west London, and I can see them thinking, 'Why do you live there?'
I've always enjoyed painting, but I went to teach in schools in Zimbabwe instead.
As a father of two children, I am used to seeing kids in the midst of a five-alarm meltdown over the choice of DVD or the necessity of broccoli.
The trouble is, I just don't know if I'm too human or not human enough.
Empires will come and go. The Soviet Union collapses; China can become a superpower, but 'Blue Peter' stays the same.
I'm not trying to acquire a reputation as serious documentary maker for its own sake.
Sometimes I feel a bit socially disconnected in terms of being a little bit gullible about how people interrelate emotionally.
Big game hunters and the hunting industry in South Africa know a lot of people regard what they do as terrible, and the media have tended not to do them any favours. So it was an uphill struggle to win trust from the people and to get into the world.
Do I care about clothes and stuff? Not much. It's a bit sick, isn't it, people spending all that money on clothes? I'm too stingy. I wouldn't pay £100 for a shirt.
You can say, 'I am a poet, rock-climbing shaman, and my name is Hiawatha Moonbeam,' and people in America will say, 'Hey, that's great. All power to you, man'.
I am genuinely a bit confused about the world, a little bit bumbling.
I think everybody carries a slight sense of being different, and I know that it comes very naturally to me.
I've got an interest in Zimbabwe. I spent a few months there before uni, so I'd like to get back to that.
I think people are so immersed in the anti-Scientology mindset by consuming tabloid media and stories about space aliens. It's baffling. When I say I want to see a more positive side of the church, all I'm saying is I want to get past these headlines that talk about aliens and Tom Cruise jumping on a sofa.
You can talk to someone relatively famous, and they say, 'What do you do? What do you do for a job?' and I say, 'I make documentaries for the BBC,' and you see their eyes just glaze over.
Arguably, there's an emotional side of life that I'm not always completely plugged into.
A lot of money could be saved if we ate urban wildlife.
L.A. is the opposite of Britain in a lot of respects, and that's what draws so many British people here.
I don't like that feeling of holding back difficult questions. I feel like the more I can be transparent in the way I approach a story, the more it makes a satisfying programme.
Clearly I'm able to read emotions. But I do feel... What is it? Awkwardness. I'm not a slick dude. That's what it comes down to. The nakedness, the guilelessness... that's quite real.
I have been to a few A-list parties, but not massively. It's not my life, but it's fun dipping into it.
I think what I'm good at is getting to know people and trying to build a relationship over a few weeks and trying to get to the truth.
There are fear mongers who talk about Islam as somehow it is an incubator of hate... remember Christians, like the Westboro Baptist Church, are just as capable of promoting intolerance.
I'm not that comfortable doing polemic or being strident.
As a BBC broadcaster, I really do hope that the new incarnation of 'Top Gear' with Chris Evans does well.
I'm not necessarily scanning for clues when I make documentaries.
I feel like, if there's an elephant in the room, I'd really like to start off by introducing the elephant in the room. And sometimes it's funny.
Although my dad's a writer, we grew up in a telly-watching household. I never found him disparaging about television.
I like eating food after it's gone off.
When you're in your 40s, you become more conscious of life being of limited duration and that you need to create memories and go on little adventures from time to time.
People say I'm deceptively unassuming, but that's the way I go through life. I'm not flash. You can make it sound calculated, but it's pretty much just me.
When interviews are too cosy, I don't enjoy them.
I just follow the subjects I'm interested in.
I've always seen TV as... it didn't occupy the same rarefied space as literature, but it's art you can use day to day. I've never been hung up on where it figures in the hierarchy of learning.
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.'
I both admired my father and his writing, and I saw how much he valued it.
My guilty fear is that what I'm doing, probably anyone could do. And that I just got a lot of lucky breaks.
I am genuinely slightly vague and chaotic in my habits. For good or ill, you know.
I think of myself as being quite affable, approachable, fairly easy to get to know.
It's in the DNA of Scientology that they don't trust journalists.
Scientology is not that different from other religions. And yet, at the same time, we don't have Anglicans doing the things that are alleged to be done in Scientology, at least in the Sea Org.
All religions are, in some basic sense, irrational.
I think I have a slight fear of intimacy.
I was always attracted and repelled by the idea of being a writer.
The documentary genre, shows like 'Making a Murderer' and 'The Jinx' on HBO, there's been a whole raft of long-form docs.
In the past, I've tried to show the human side of people involved in stigmatised or misunderstood lifestyles. I've tried to resist easy judgments and not pander to prejudices.
I think there's a feeling of - a grassroots feeling of being betrayed by the elites in some way: that the system is working for itself and not for the people at the bottom.
If I actually invited someone to make a documentary about me, and I said, 'Anything goes', and then I refused to answer any questions, that would be inconsistent.
True believers of Scientology seem to know with utmost certainty that they have found the answer to the deepest riddles of all time - they may or may not be right, but that kind of self-belief is very appealing.
One of the things I have always enjoyed about Scientology is their proactive approach to journalists who are covering them.
After studying the subject for years, watching countless YouTube videos of Scientology handlers filming critics and journalists, it felt amazing to be on the receiving end myself: I felt like I'd been blooded.
I try not to be too judgmental.
Not counting the brand of Sunni Islam practised by the so-called Islamic State, there is probably no religion in the world that comes in for more flak than Scientology.
I don't think I'm afraid of anything.
I don't feel that as human beings we have an obligation to dislike someone based on their beliefs, and it's OK to have a human reaction to someone even if you feel what they do is hideous and objectionable. You can still enjoy their company and find them interesting to be around.
In my normal way of doing things, there's a little bit of 'going native' that takes place, where you're in a world long enough, you can't really help but start to see things in a nuanced, more humanistic way. Just because you're with people and you start to, in general, slightly like the people you're with.
It's in the DNA of all the shows that I have done that are about people that are dealing with very stressful situations that are giving them a lot of angst.
I think he could win, absolutely. I think he could win because there's Trump supporters out there who aren't even revealing themselves as such. For me, that's a scary prospect because I think he'd be a disastrous president.
I've always slightly harboured a dream of making a film, a documentary feature. Somehow, I just got into a way of working a routine of making TV docs.
Prisons and jails, I tend to feel that you're actually safer as a journalist than you might think, certainly more than it appears.
Look after your body, because I'm 44, and things are happening that I never dreamed of - like bad joints and man boobs!
When it was time to meet a chimpanzee, I got very, very anxious because they have the strength of ten men, so I hear.
When you don't have access to a subject, and all you have is ex-members and critics, there is this gravitational pull toward telling a certain version of events. Scientology would say this, and they have a point, that it's like doing a portrait of a marriage in which you're only hearing from the ex-wife and not the ex-husband.
Funnily enough, the most danger I felt was when I did a story about exotic animals kept as pets in America.
There's obviously a lot of controversy around the issue of hunting as there is around gambling, and I like these stories where there is a moral dimension, stories that force you to think about your prejudices about a subject and explore the extent to which they are justified.
I've discovered I am quite a puritanical person.
Hunting really divides people in Britain. We keep pets, and we name our animals, but we're not too worried about industrial hunting practices.
It is important to note that most of the patients in Ohio's mental health facilities have never committed crimes. They are institutionalised because they have lost touch with reality and are having problems functioning unaided in the community.
It's difficult to describe the weirdness of speaking to a man who appears to be perfectly in control of his faculties, who can deliver off-the-cuff repartee, and yet who is actually utterly disconnected from who he is.
Some things should remain private.
Reflecting the truth sounds easy, but sometimes it's not.
I'm not pugnacious or argumentative. I'd probably feel fear going into a pub in the Outback.
Sometimes you shoot for 40 or 50 hours for a one-hour show, and you have to make some very hard choices.
Meeting forensic patients for the first time could occasionally be an unnerving experience. They often came across as mild and gentle people, but the details of the crimes were harrowing in the extreme.
I didn't think, 'I'd really like to work in TV; maybe I could carve out a niche where I talk to people who are somehow involved in marginal or difficult lifestyles... ' It was something I gravitated to very naturally as a subject area, almost instinctively, and somehow turned into a TV career without meaning to.
The thing is, I have never been that confident, and, um, I have a lot of self-doubt, and I had never - I don't think I ever would have consciously chosen to be a television presenter.
I don't like watching things where I think the people onscreen are ahead of me or assuming I know something that I don't know.
The many ways of getting content for free have slashed the profits of the professionals in their respective fields.
I would love to make a film in the outback or in Papua New Guinea, in Port Moresby. I know that it's not in Australia, but it's not too far.
'Cunnamulla' is a beautifully bleak portrait of a lonely town in which people are leading lives of sort of quiet desperation.
As much as the glasses, it's the Englishness and the gangliness. The apparent lack of muscularity... they indicate I'm not a macho man.
In west London where I live, white people are a minority. In the area I am in, which is the borough of Brent, whites are less than 50%.
There's always a negotiation that goes on to persuade people we are coming to the subject with an open mind but without surrendering too many pawns. We don't want to misrepresent the fact that we will draw our own conclusions.
I am always drawn to things that feel different to what I would experience at home: things that offer a combination of unfamiliarity and a sort of bleak glamour. I think the outback has that.
There have been times when I've felt inappropriately emotional. I remember making 'The Most Hated Family in America' about the Westboro Baptist Church, and being on the way to a funeral of a U.S. soldier with the Phelps family; they were going to picket the funeral.
I really do try not to emote. I don't like seeing it on documentaries - it seems a bit unprofessional. I also need to be human being and be a kind of sympathetic presence for the contributors I'm with, so there' a line you have to walk.
I never want to feel more than the viewers. I'm not trying to be an automaton. It's like when you see people laughing on camera, and you don't find it funny as a viewer - it's an offputting experience.
I'm following my interests, and there's something about investigating the world and creating a watchable, entertaining programme out of it that is deeply satisfying.
We have a double agenda of trying to deliver something exciting that people will talk about and will brighten their day and will amaze people and make us proud to have created an object of beauty. And on the other hand being true to the story.
I never thought I would really like to be on television, and the story of me getting into it was quite lucky, really, just a series of chance encounters. So I am not exactly putting myself across as a celebrity, although people might perceive me that way.
Celebrity is quite a fraught word. It is not something I aspire to, but I can certainly see why it could be.
For publicity purposes, everything gets simplified, and the fact that I wear glasses and am somewhat bookish makes me a geek. That's fine; there needs to be a shorthand, but there are important geek traits that I don't really share.
I don't go around saturated in guilt or anything like that. I do worry about things quite a lot, but I don't feel as though I am a bad person.