Louis Theroux is a well-known British documentary filmmaker and broadcaster. His series “When Louis Met…” and “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends” are his most popular works.
Theroux’s documentaries are heavily participatory and performance based as he has become the driving force in all of his films/series. The documentaries he makes star him as the reoccurring on-screen personality throughout thus making the contents just as much about him as the subject. This style has allowed him to become a recognisable tv personality as well as a documentarian.
Theroux tends to use his documentaries as a way to allow him to explore areas of life he would not usually be exposed to. This is evident in his documentaries Under the Knife, following plastic surgery patients in LA, and Gambling in Las Vegas, following the addictive pastime of gamblers, both of which feature Theroux joining the day to day lives of regular people and watching as he becomes more educated on the topics resulting in the audience learning simultaneously. The fact the Theroux is put in the same position as the audience ostensibly not knowing much about the subject and learning from them as the filming progresses continues allows his films to carry a personal and natural essence.
It is evident in multiple of Theroux’s documentaries that he doesn’t shy away from allowing the process to become personal. He appears to build relationships which the subjects of his film and uses these new bonds to ask personal questions during interviews. In his documentary “Louis and the Brothel”, he stays at the brothel for a week getting to know the working girls and the owners on and off screen; the episode features multiple scenes of him and the subjects hanging out in an informal manner carrying out their day-to-day tasks and it is in these moments that he tends to interview them. Theroux started off as a journalist which is evident in his interviews as he attempts to dive deeper than the surface value of the situations the subjects are in.
Theoux has done multiple ‘follow up’ documentaries, his most popular probably being his documentary Savile (2016) which saw Louis talk to those who knew TV celebrity and sexual abuser Jimmy Savile following his death as he attempts to understand how his crimes went unseen and how he himself never knew something was off after his developing friendship with Savile that formed after their first documentary together When Louis met Jimmy (2000). Similarly, in 2011 he revisited the family he studied in his documentary The Most Hated Family in America (2007). Theroux’s ability to revisit past documentaries and subjects to catch up and reflect is another example of the audience investment in his subjects’ stories as we are made to feel invested in their lives enough to want to watch a revisited version of their situations.
Bethany Lee's Film Studies Blog 