Feature: A Scientology movie only Louis Theroux could make

Theroux helped popularize for television a hip journalistic immersion that’s now de rigeur. (See the “hey check this out!” reporting that built modern media empire VICE.) What distinguishes Theroux’s docs is that he doesn’t just want to show off these rookeries of weirdos. He wants to understand them. In his 2008 special, Louis Behind Bars, he describes California’s notorious San Quentin prison as a “world-within-a-world.” This is what his docs are about: microcosms of life and thought that reveal something of the way we all live and think and believe.

Special to Maclean's magazine.