Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television

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 – though 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.

I was ready to post the letter, when John, with his director’s hat on, possibly thinking it might provoke a reaction and certainly mindful that it was more visual than me popping it in a letterbox, had the idea of hand-delivering a copy to someone at Scientology’s secret base. We were now a couple of months into filming and while I had been reluctant to be seen to be goading the church or trolling them – I kept thinking about where the line was between reasonable journalism and gratuitous provocation – John and Simon had a more pragmatic and ultimately more sensible view of the need to proactively put ourselves in the Church’s crosshairs. We made the two-hour drive through the desert and arrived at a collection of buildings just visible behind trees that straddled a rural highway, with low walls at the edge of the road and, around the perimeter, higher fences with razor wire and floodlights. It all seemed normal enough, as alleged mind-bending secret cult headquarters go; no groans or clanking chains were audible. There were lawns and a golf course and all in all it could have been a very large high-end rehab clinic and country club. Except maybe for the razor wire. And the floodlights.

At the front there was a small gatehouse with a sentry and I went up to it, peering in and mouthing, ‘I’ve got a letter!’ I couldn’t hear much back so I tugged on the door and then the sentry tugged back – he seemed discombobulated, or ‘enturbulated’ to use the Scientology word – so I backed off, a little confused, and we drove down the highway to a small side road to ponder our next move. It was here, a short while later, that a fierce-looking middle-aged woman in dark glasses and a uniform of white shirt and slacks drove up with a tall cameraman in tow. ‘This is not a public road,’ she said, with some heat. ‘This is not a county road. This is our road . . . You now need to leave.’

I protested that I was only trying to deliver a letter, to which the lady said that I’d trespassed ‘several times’. I resented this – I don’t regard going up to a gatehouse to deliver something as trespassing – and despite various resolutions I’d made to remain respectful whatever transpired, a little part of me now started to go a tiny bit John Sweeney. Not that I shouted, but I was aware of no longer being calm and at one point, knowing it might irritate her, I slipped into Scientologese. ‘I have not trespassed several times,’ I said. ‘Clear the word “several”!’ (‘Clear’ being a Scientology word for ‘Look up in the dictionary.’)

There was some more back-and-forth, and the police arrived soon after, having been called by the Scientologists. They were friendly enough – we debated whether or not the road was public or which parts of it were – and a little after that we left and drove back up to LA.

As the months passed, the need to plan a climactic scene of re-enactment became more pressing and eventually late in the year we settled on a concept: the most troubling allegations made by Marty and others were that Miscavige had been physically abusive to his staff and, specifically, that he’d shut them up, for months and possibly years, in a virtual prison known colloquially as the Hole. It seemed natural that we should, with Marty’s help, depict the Marty version of what the Hole might have been like.

It was towards the end of the year by this time. I’d moved back to London. Meanwhile letters had been continuing to arrive from Scientology’s lawyers – cc’ed to various senior people at the BBC – to the effect that I was an unserious journalist, a tabloid provocateur and that the contributors I’d lined up were disgruntled apostates, fantasists, who were kicked out of Scientology for incompetence.

There had been a couple of further engagements with agents deployed by Scientology. A glamorous European woman and a cameraman had appeared outside the studio where we were filming one day. They were filming us setting up from across the road but refused to identify themselves. ‘We’re just making a documentary about beeble,’ she said, meaning ‘people’. I’d started filming her with a Flip video camera and she’d run away. We had spent one whole day being tailed by a car with smoked-out windows – almost certainly a PI hired by Scientology lawyers. It was memorable, not just for the weirdness of being followed in a creepy fashion by people in the employ of a self-described religion supposedly dedicated to spreading peace, understanding, and happiness (would Justin Welby do that?) but also because we took elaborate measures to try to corner the driver where he or she had momentarily parked so I could get out and interrogate whoever it was, and when the moment came I messed up, stopped our car just a little too far back, giving our tail enough space to slip away.

John and I, and our DP Will Pugh, went back and forth about where we should shoot our Hole re-enactment, though we tended to agree that there was a purity and logic about doing it in the desert close to the real Scientology base. John suggested a recce of possible locations, and bringing Marty with us, and maybe our ‘David Miscavige’, a talented young actor named Andrew Perez. Since being cast, Andrew had gone method in his approach, devouring books on the subject and he’d expressed an interest in making a visit to the base, to get a feel for the place. We could kill two birds with one stone: scout the desert and take Andrew on a Scientology field trip.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘If we’re going to do all this we should shoot it.’

And so Marty flew out from Texas again and we drove out to the desert one last time – him and me and Andrew – with the crew filming as we went.

Marty was in a state of more or less on-going semi-grumpiness towards me by this stage – possibly I’d asked him the same question four or five times too many which is an occupational hazard of interviewing the same person over the course of a year. He kept mentioning that everyone else’s questions – the production assistants, the runners, the extras – were better than mine: more spiritually informed and more acute. This was fine by me – drama is conflict – though I did sometimes feel a little like his ill-treated and long-suffering spouse, undermined and belittled, and told constantly how much better he could do than me.

When we arrived at a spot not too far from the Base, an expanse of sand and creosote bushes with bare brown mountains in the distance, Marty pointed out, reasonably, that it looked nothing like the grounds of the Scientology secret HQ, which had neat landscaped lawns and spreading trees. Besides, he said, regarding the Hole, ‘It was all inside. So you could literally recreate it anywhere . . . It’s going to be a logistics nightmare out here.’

We chatted a little more about the feel that we were looking for. ‘You’ve got to create that claustrophobia,’ Marty said. ‘It’s a nondescript cheap-ass sort of office set-up.’ Andrew and Marty ran some lines that Miscavige had allegedly said, and then, with the light starting to go, Andrew and I drove a few miles down the road to the Base, the same spot where we’d had the police called on us before. It was dark when we got there. In the months since I’d last been there a gate had been erected, but we’d done some research and double-checked with the local authorities that the road was open to the public, which it was. We even had a filming permit. We climbed over, and we were by the fence when security lights started going on and off. The action of the lights was slightly spooky: they didn’t seem to be motion-activated and I wondered if we were being filmed by hidden cameras. Still, they had the side benefit of allowing us to see more clearly.

Then a loud commanding male voice rang out from the main road, ‘You guys are trespassing. You need to leave or I’m calling the cops.’

We headed back up to our vehicle and that’s when I saw the same woman, once again accompanied by a tall man holding a small camera.

‘The road’s closed. You’re trespassing. You need to leave,’ she said.

‘Apparently it’s a public road,’ I replied and waved a copy of the filming permit.

‘No it isn’t.’

‘And we have a—’

‘No, you don’t. See that thing that says “Road Closed”? What’s your name? Lewis? Loo-ee? Are you so stupid that you can’t see the sign that says “Road Closed”? Do you know what a road means? It’s closed.’

By now I knew the woman’s name – Catherine Fraser – and I began using it liberally, hoping it might irritate her.

‘Catherine, Catherine. What is the issue here? We don’t want to cause you any upset, Catherine.’

‘I don’t want him filming me,’ she said. ‘Tell him to stop.’

‘But you’re filming me,’ I pointed out.

‘Tell him to stop,’ she repeated.

‘You tell him to stop and I’ll tell him to stop,’ I said. This was a bluff. If she’d agreed, I would have been in trouble, given filming was the express purpose of my being there.

‘Catherine, my deep desire is to speak to someone from the Sea Org,’ I said. ‘This is good. Let’s just keep the conversation going.’

She retreated to her car but her cameraman stayed outside, filming me. I got out my trusty Flip digital recorder. It was too dark to see anything in the viewfinder but I figured it might intimidate him. Then I intoned: ‘Are you making a documentary too? And if so, who is your one for?’ But no answer came back and so we just filmed wordlessly, in the dark and lit only by the crew car’s headlights and the sweeping beams of the cars passing us on the road.

When the time came to film the scene of the Hole re-enactment, there was a part of me that was amazed we’d got to the end without Marty bailing. A few weeks earlier, I’d been trying to think up other ideas for our little team of actors to re-enact and my mind had turned to allegations of physical abuse that involved the Sea Org members running around trees for hours in the hot desert. It was part of a drill created by Hubbard – the ‘Cause Resurgence Rundown’ – that had allegedly been turned into a punishment by Miscavige.

I had suggested this in an email to Marty.

‘You running around a tree with actors, I guess, tells me where you are going,’ he replied. ‘It is where I have expressed repeated concerns about – let us do our all to be as entertaining as possible by clowning. As I have explained to you on numerous occasions (I am sure providing you with miles of great footage of entertaining impatience and frustration), to John from the outset, and even to Simon two and nearly one-half years ago, I don’t really want to participate in such a project – let alone devote, what, five or six out-of-town weekends to it while raising an infant. I am rethinking whether the December trip is worth anyone’s while.’

John had had to step in and send some long pacifying email to smooth Marty’s feathers.

Marty had also experienced a nasty Scientology encounter at the airport one afternoon – after doing some filming with us – when three Scientology executives had showered him with weird abuse. The Church later tried to claim that the executives had been there by chance and that Marty had first abused them, though I found that a little hard to believe. Marty filmed some of the encounter on his primitive mobile phone. Smudgy digital images showed two men and a woman in executive dress: ‘You’re a loser!’ the woman said. ‘You’re nothing! Why don’t you stop committing suppressive acts and live a real life?’ It was a surreal display: the naked antagonism in the name of spirituality and ethics.

Marty uploaded the video to his blog. It went viral. For a while the satisfaction of having a hit video seemed to quell some of Marty’s disgruntlement towards me and the project. But that soon passed and instead he came to see it as a side effect of his doing our film – which it probably was – and then by extension to resent me for, in a roundabout way, fomenting the trolling and making his life miserable in order to generate material for the film.

We had brought back our little band of actors one final time – including Andrew our Miscavige and our Tom Cruise – and rendezvoused at a West Hollywood studio where a set had been created: a cheap-looking conference room interior, little more than chairs and a table and a window with bars, and an easel with a flipchart. Marty had written a rough script, and the day started with him presiding over a bull session in which he explained the background to the scene: the Hole, how it had worked, how he had been sent there and how he had reached his breaking point. He also described the particular day that the script depicted – when Marty had (allegedly) seen Miscavige beat up his friend Tom DeVocht, causing Marty to make the decision to flee.

When the time came to do a take, Andrew Perez, our Miscavige actor, went full curtain-chewing loco, delivering a freewheeling rant based on Marty’s words, pushing subordinates around, hurling abuse. ‘Get down! Lick the fucking floor! You fucking mental midgets! You fucking degraded beings don’t get shit done!’ At one point he grabbed the leg of the flipchart easel and smashed it on the table, causing it to shatter into a thousand pieces – for a moment I worried he might have put out somebody’s eye. ‘How do you handle an SP. You handle him roughly, OK?’

‘That was a command performance,’ Marty said afterwards. ‘It was as if he was channelling that guy.’ John came down to congratulate the actors. I asked if he thought we needed another take. ‘Uh, no,’ he said, looking as though I must be mad. ‘There’s a guy in the control room who actually seemed quite disturbed.’ Maybe he was worried about Andrew smashing another leg. Either way, there was for a few minutes a feeling of relief that we’d done the main job of work we were supposed to do – that it had revealed something about the creed that Marty had espoused and advanced for so many years – and more than that, if true, the existence of the Hole was arguably an expression of something inside Scientology itself: a logical consequence of the most extreme form of its totalizing worldview and fanatical intensity.

I was wrapped up in these thoughts when I happened to wander outside to find Marty in conversation with two older guys with white hair and beards who looked like Kenny Rogers and his session bassist.

‘What’s an SP like you doing in a place like this?’ ‘Kenny’ said to Marty.

‘How much is the BBC paying you?’ said Kenny’s friend.

‘Between the foster care and what the BBC is paying you, is that enough for you to cover your nut?’ Kenny asked. ‘Do you get paid enough for the foster care?’

Scientologists have a gift for pushing people’s buttons. In fact, you could argue the most compelling evidence that Hubbard may have been onto something is how effective they are at causing people anguish: John Sweeney losing his shit during filming; me by the side of the road. And now, Marty, with the mention of his son.

They turned and left. Marty looked shaken.

‘This is really sick, man,’ he said. ‘None of these things just happen. David Miscavige had to direct this. He scripted it and he directed it.’

‘We probably shouldn’t tell the actors what happened,’ I said. ‘It might upset them.’

‘Welcome to my life, Louis. I have to live this life where I can’t really share what happens to me on a day-to-day basis. We can’t make friends. It’s very difficult to say, “Hey, come on over for a barbecue, but realize you might be being surveilled and it might be going into the archive of the most pernicious, dangerous cult the Western world has known for the last fifty years.” ’

I’ve thought a lot about what I did next. I’m still not sure whether it was right or wrong. I chose this moment of Marty’s vulnerability to bring up his misdeeds in the Church. ‘You ran private investigators,’ I said. ‘Some of these techniques were things you did to other people.’

Marty paused and looked away.

‘You’re so wrong,’ he said. ‘It never even crossed my mind to think about bringing a person’s child into something.’

‘You had PIs pretending to be people’s friends while secretly—’

Marty was now wandering off, seemingly in disgust.

‘Isn’t that a fact?’ I said.

He stopped and turned. ‘You’re a fuckin’ asshole. That’s a fact,’ he said. ‘Fuck you.’

Almost immediately I felt bad at how startled and betrayed he looked at my questions. He paused now, clearly angry and upset.

‘You know, I’m sitting here having my child brought into this thing and you want to make me defend myself?’ he said. ‘Fuck yourself.’

‘OK, I consider myself fucked,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to say now.’

‘This is really offensive. I’m really fuckin’ offended by it. I’m telling you I have no life. I can’t even make friendships. I am unemployable. And you start giving me this shit?’

Then we stood in silence for a bit, there on the pavement outside the studio.

We filmed one or two more scenes: our David Miscavige playing backgammon with our Tom Cruise (we figured, having cast a Tom Cruise, we needed to use him in something); a final triumphalist oration by our David Miscavige, taken from a speech he gave at a Scientology gala in 2004.

But in that moment with Marty, after he’d been emotionally ambushed by the two Scientologists, I was confident we had an ending and, therefore, a film.