Louis Theroux

I feel like, if there's an elephant in the room, I'd really like to start off by introducing the elephant in the room. And sometimes it's funny.

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.

It's in the DNA of Scientology that they don't trust journalists.

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 people are so immersed in the anti-Scientology mindset by consuming tabloid media and stories about space aliens. It's baffling. When I say I want to see a more positive side of the church, all I'm saying is I want to get past these headlines that talk about aliens and Tom Cruise jumping on a sofa.

There is no religion that has a monopoly on bigotry.

Not counting the brand of Sunni Islam practised by the so-called Islamic State, there is probably no religion in the world that comes in for more flak than Scientology.

When it was time to meet a chimpanzee, I got very, very anxious because they have the strength of ten men, so I hear.

You can talk to someone relatively famous, and they say, 'What do you do? What do you do for a job?' and I say, 'I make documentaries for the BBC,' and you see their eyes just glaze over.