Louis Theroux admits he's 'slowing down' and taking a step back from documentary career
There's a new documentary series getting up close and personal with major figures in fringe movements which aims to figure out how they manage to hoover up such devoted followers.
Presented by Jamali Maddix and produced by Louis Theroux, Follow The Leader dives into the worlds of online paedophile hunters, 'passport bros' in South America, an extreme gun group called 'Rod of Iron' led by a man with a crown of bullets and a Chicago prison where many of the inmates feel there's no way out of a life of crime.
Check out the trailer:
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While the groups he meets might initially seem to be quite different, Maddix did see something which connected all of the people he met.
He said those he met were 'all suffering from some type of trauma so it makes them act out in a certain way'.
Having observed these four rather different groups shown in Follow The Leader, he told LADbible he thought 'if someone else would have got there earlier they would have gone another way'.
"You see some guys that join a religious cult and you go ‘I think you would have joined any religious cult’, you needed something that was within that area."
After producing the documentary Louis Theroux observed another common thread he saw in the various groups Jamali met during Follow The Leader.
"Often it’s a world which requires you to take a new name," Louis told LADbible of the the situations Jamali went through in Follow The Leader.
“It's not exact, but whether it's in the worlds of passport bro influencers or predator hunters you're, in a sense, subscribing to a tribe, like you're signing up to a code, a culture and a way of life, and that gives you an identity.
“I think it's a misapprehension to imagine that human beings are motivated by what you think they might be, which is survival, comfort, money, necessarily.
“I mean, those are all parts of it but actually, meaning is important, some sense of belonging, some sense of status.
“So these are forms of irrationality that actually fill those other very basic human needs by giving you some sort of heroic role in a realm of life.”
As the conversation turned towards Louis' Theroux-ture (sorry) he said there were still things he'd like to do, but was enjoying things after having 'definitely slowed down' and working behind the scenes a bit more.
“I'd like to still do some things in front of the camera, but I've definitely slowed down, and I've been enjoying being back of house," Theroux said.
"I’ve been really enjoying being around a bit more for my family, being across different projects."
However, don't think you've seen the last of Theroux as he said that watching Follow The Leader did give him a bit of 'a pang' and a feeling that he would have liked to have been out there himself.
He said: “I won’t pretend I didn’t get a pang when I watched the episodes taking shape and seeing how brilliant they were, and how extraordinary the worlds that Jamali and the team had found.
“Shout out to the team as well by the way, they all did brilliantly along with Jamali.
“But I did feel ‘oh wow, that would have been extraordinary to be out there and see these worlds’."
The iconic broadcaster said that 'some part of me that thinks ‘maybe there’s no more stories out there’, but when he saw Maddix's documentary he felt it 'reflected something about the new media landscape that was really interesting'.
“It felt like those dystopian films where in the future there’ll be this sort of Big Brother, a form of entertainment that involves the state pursuing criminals," he said of the Predator Hunters episode, where YouTubers catching paedophiles drew in crowds both online and in person.
“The future’s arrived and it’s not the state, it’s these private actors with their own platforms pursuing alleged criminals in the name of entertainment. I went ‘oh wow, it really is happening and it’s absolutely bizarre'.”
“It is sort of ‘electronic vigilante justice’.”
Theroux said that Maddix was 'a full fledged broadcaster, presenter, program maker in his own right' and needed no advice from him on how to make Follow The Leader, but he was very happy to work with the 33-year-old.
He said: "I'd admired his work without knowing him, and then when the opportunity to work with him came up, obviously I was thrilled."
By the time Maddix was working on Follow The Leader he already had documentary experience with the likes of Hate Thy Neighbour under his belt, but found the groups he met this time 'a bit different'.
He said: “This one was a bit different to other ones I've made, especially like the Rod of Iron, because they were so kind of ‘media trained’.
“It wasn't media training. It's what they think media training is, which is just stonewall everything like a lawyer has basically said to them ‘don't say anything and they can't show anything bad’.
“But they don't know that kind of looks weirder."
As for his view on Maddix's strengths, Theroux praised the Follow The Leader presenter as 'he just gets along with people'.
"You can see he’s got a point of view but he doesn’t overdo it. He builds relationships with these extraordinary contributors."
Reflecting on his own work, Louis said he 'probably was guilty in my work of being at times overly passive'.
He said: "I actually just enjoy surrendering to the cascade of weirdness, and just sort of trying to figure out what's going on but actually, you’ve got to choose your moment to make it.
“You’ve got to let the action unfold and let yourself form an opinion alongside the viewer.
“I think that's the key to this kind of filmmaking, which obviously I love very much, which is participatory filmmaking.
“You arrive with a rough idea of what’s going to happen but then as it unfolds you learn along with the viewer and then make a few judicious interjections that allows the viewer to form an opinion of what’s going on.”
Jamali Maddix: Follow The Leader airs on U&Dave at 10pm each Tuesday from 17 September, with the box-set available to stream free on U from Tuesday 17 September.
Topics: Louis Theroux, Celebrity, Documentaries, TV and Film, TV
Joe Harker