The fact is that you can be a Nazi living in a little trailer in the middle of Montana and as awful as everything you stand for is, you're basically an angry guy in a shack. Scientology, on the other hand, is a multi-billion dollar institution with tentacles that reach into lots of countries. I don't think it's as powerful as many people think it is, but compared to the sorts of people I've dealt with, it is a force to be reckoned with. It has global influence and very very deep pockets.

Louis Theroux

The world is a stage we walk upon. We are all in a way fictional characters who write ourselves with our beliefs.

Louis Theroux

writing character world

Weird Weekends set out to discover the genuinely odd in the most ordinary setting. To me, it's almost a privilege to be welcomed into these communities and to shine a light on them and, maybe, through my enthusiasm, to get people to reveal more of themselves than they may have intended. The show is laughing at me, adrift in their world, as much as at them. I don't have to play up that stuff. I'm not a matinee idol disguised as a nerd

Louis Theroux

weekend idols play

It's an industry of lonely people in a crowd, Bill Margold was saying. 'They're scared to get close to each other. You're far better off having someone to sleep next to then having someone to sleep with because you have to trust someone you sleep next to.

Louis Theroux

lonely sleep people

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. It's not as though you do that enough and then graduate - you sort of need to make a conscious decision to work in a different way.

Louis Theroux

different decision dream

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.

Louis Theroux

long people world

I think everybody carries a slight sense of being different, and I know that it comes very naturally to me.

Louis Theroux

think know me being-different

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.

Louis Theroux

elephant feel sometimes funny

There is no shame is being ambivalent about almost everything in your life.

Louis Theroux

your everything shame life

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.

Louis Theroux

think you gambling moral

I am genuinely a bit confused about the world, a little bit bumbling.

Louis Theroux

i-am about confused world

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.'

Louis Theroux

you angry people thinking

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.

Louis Theroux

game trust struggle people

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.

Louis Theroux

day you learning art

I just follow the subjects I'm interested in.

Louis Theroux

follow interested just subjects

I think of myself as being quite affable, approachable, fairly easy to get to know.

Louis Theroux

myself think know easy

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.

Louis Theroux

studying end amazing myself

A lot of money could be saved if we ate urban wildlife.

Louis Theroux

urban wildlife saved money

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.

Louis Theroux

control who man difficult

I'm not pugnacious or argumentative. I'd probably feel fear going into a pub in the Outback.

Louis Theroux

pub going feel fear

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.

Louis Theroux

much man macho glasses