I'm following my interests, and there's something about investigating the world and creating a watchable, entertaining programme out of it that is deeply satisfying.
— Louis Theroux
I really do try not to emote. I don't like seeing it on documentaries - it seems a bit unprofessional. I also need to be human being and be a kind of sympathetic presence for the contributors I'm with, so there' a line you have to walk.
I don't go around saturated in guilt or anything like that. I do worry about things quite a lot, but I don't feel as though I am a bad person.
The thing is, I have never been that confident, and, um, I have a lot of self-doubt, and I had never - I don't think I ever would have consciously chosen to be a television presenter.
I would love to make a film in the outback or in Papua New Guinea, in Port Moresby. I know that it's not in Australia, but it's not too far.
I didn't think, 'I'd really like to work in TV; maybe I could carve out a niche where I talk to people who are somehow involved in marginal or difficult lifestyles... ' It was something I gravitated to very naturally as a subject area, almost instinctively, and somehow turned into a TV career without meaning to.
I sometimes get accused of being 'faux-naive,' but for me, it's really just about getting down to the basics of something.
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.
Some things should remain private.
It is important to note that most of the patients in Ohio's mental health facilities have never committed crimes. They are institutionalised because they have lost touch with reality and are having problems functioning unaided in the community.
Reflecting the truth sounds easy, but sometimes it's not.
A lot of money could be saved if we ate urban wildlife.
I've always enjoyed painting, but I went to teach in schools in Zimbabwe instead.
I don't feel that as human beings we have an obligation to dislike someone based on their beliefs, and it's OK to have a human reaction to someone even if you feel what they do is hideous and objectionable. You can still enjoy their company and find them interesting to be around.
When it was time to meet a chimpanzee, I got very, very anxious because they have the strength of ten men, so I hear.
When you don't have access to a subject, and all you have is ex-members and critics, there is this gravitational pull toward telling a certain version of events. Scientology would say this, and they have a point, that it's like doing a portrait of a marriage in which you're only hearing from the ex-wife and not the ex-husband.
I think he could win, absolutely. I think he could win because there's Trump supporters out there who aren't even revealing themselves as such. For me, that's a scary prospect because I think he'd be a disastrous president.
We have a double agenda of trying to deliver something exciting that people will talk about and will brighten their day and will amaze people and make us proud to have created an object of beauty. And on the other hand being true to the story.
I never want to feel more than the viewers. I'm not trying to be an automaton. It's like when you see people laughing on camera, and you don't find it funny as a viewer - it's an offputting experience.
Celebrity is quite a fraught word. It is not something I aspire to, but I can certainly see why it could be.
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.
I am always drawn to things that feel different to what I would experience at home: things that offer a combination of unfamiliarity and a sort of bleak glamour. I think the outback has that.
I think everybody carries a slight sense of being different, and I know that it comes very naturally to me.
The many ways of getting content for free have slashed the profits of the professionals in their respective fields.
Hunting really divides people in Britain. We keep pets, and we name our animals, but we're not too worried about industrial hunting practices.
I've discovered I am quite a puritanical person.
I'm not pugnacious or argumentative. I'd probably feel fear going into a pub in the Outback.
As a father of two children, I am used to seeing kids in the midst of a five-alarm meltdown over the choice of DVD or the necessity of broccoli.
Look after your body, because I'm 44, and things are happening that I never dreamed of - like bad joints and man boobs!
There is no shame is being ambivalent about almost everything in your life.
Do I care about clothes and stuff? Not much. It's a bit sick, isn't it, people spending all that money on clothes? I'm too stingy. I wouldn't pay £100 for a shirt.
Funnily enough, the most danger I felt was when I did a story about exotic animals kept as pets in America.
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.
I've got an interest in Zimbabwe. I spent a few months there before uni, so I'd like to get back to that.
For publicity purposes, everything gets simplified, and the fact that I wear glasses and am somewhat bookish makes me a geek. That's fine; there needs to be a shorthand, but there are important geek traits that I don't really share.
There have been times when I've felt inappropriately emotional. I remember making 'The Most Hated Family in America' about the Westboro Baptist Church, and being on the way to a funeral of a U.S. soldier with the Phelps family; they were going to picket the funeral.
I never thought I would really like to be on television, and the story of me getting into it was quite lucky, really, just a series of chance encounters. So I am not exactly putting myself across as a celebrity, although people might perceive me that way.
'Cunnamulla' is a beautifully bleak portrait of a lonely town in which people are leading lives of sort of quiet desperation.
In west London where I live, white people are a minority. In the area I am in, which is the borough of Brent, whites are less than 50%.
I don't like watching things where I think the people onscreen are ahead of me or assuming I know something that I don't know.
There's always a negotiation that goes on to persuade people we are coming to the subject with an open mind but without surrendering too many pawns. We don't want to misrepresent the fact that we will draw our own conclusions.
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.
Meeting forensic patients for the first time could occasionally be an unnerving experience. They often came across as mild and gentle people, but the details of the crimes were harrowing in the extreme.
Sometimes you shoot for 40 or 50 hours for a one-hour show, and you have to make some very hard choices.
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.
I tell people I live in Harlesden in north-west London, and I can see them thinking, 'Why do you live there?'
The trouble is, I just don't know if I'm too human or not human enough.
It's in the DNA of all the shows that I have done that are about people that are dealing with very stressful situations that are giving them a lot of angst.
Prisons and jails, I tend to feel that you're actually safer as a journalist than you might think, certainly more than it appears.
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.
