Louis Theroux: My Scientology Movie

At this point in the semester, I became obsessed with watching and observing documentaries, especially BBC documentaries with Theroux.

My scientology movie is as interesting as it sounds. Theroux begins his journey into the secretive and exclusive world of scientology.

He begins with interviewing a former scientologist, who was the deputy of David Miscavige.

Throughout the documentary, you see how many problems they are faced with. We are shown the movie making compounds of the scientology church and how one filmmaker escaped such a place. Throughout the documentary, I expected to see a different side where we see that scientology might not be so crazy. That was not the case, if anything we saw a large number of people who had left the church and were ready to expose its dark secrets.

With no contact with in the church, Theroux decided to create his own footage by casting people to act out scenarios that took place within the church walls.

We are taken aback by the church’s treatment of its former members, who are shamed publicly and harassed by other scientologists. These people are called suppressive persons or Sp’s for short. They hound a former scientologist in public or wherever they see him and call him an sp.

Their obsession with surveillance is also ironically documented.

Since they had no available cctv footage and limited media resources from the church of scientology, they decided to show the audience the true face of David Miscavige, through hired actors.

This is another way to send a message with in a documentary that i found very interesting.  

They had the help of former scientologists to cast the actors, who would act out real life scenarios that occurred in the church, as told by former scientologists.