Alex Gibney and Lawrence Wright with Janice Min

so I thought I would start off with a pretty simple questions you've both covered very heavy topics you've covered Enron financial ruin al-qaeda pedophilia in the Catholic Church and then Scientology so right there in the first page of your book which is so amazing and you should all read it Larry you say the Church of Scientology despite its claim of having eight million members has only thirty thousand members less than half the number of people who identify as Rastafarians so with everything going on in the world Isis mass shootings like the one unfortunately we just had today what made you care about this really tiny little religion and why should people here care I have always been interested in why people believe one thing rather than another and in America you can believe anything you want there are a lot of countries where that's not true you can only breathe one thing you can believe it more or less but in America there's a smorgasbord and it's fascinating to me that people go through the process and they choose to believe this rather than that and if they don't find something on offer they can make it up it's a very fertile religious culture and as a reporter I observe that journalists don't give a lot of credit to religion it's kind of embarrassing to write about often times but religious beliefs are far more powerful in people's lives than political beliefs you know you could I'm sure you all know people that hold very strong political views it doesn't affect their behavior at all necessarily but people who hold strong religious views organize their lives around that and societies do as well so I feel as a journalist and just as a human I'm drawn to understand what is that longing for belief and what what is the process that draws people into it Scientology seemed like a really perfect example because it's the most stigmatized religion in our country right now and yet very notable people lend their credibility good and so they must get something out of it and I wondered what is that thing what is that process that draws them in and it makes them affiliate with something that many people feel they want to keep their distance from so let's for those who aren't familiar with the with the origin story of Scientology and you know it's it's it's so fantastical so I would love if you could share it in a in a nutshell so they understand how these ideas of you know people talk about Xenu and you know maybe you can quickly talk about what that is well 80 million years ago in a planet on a galaxy far far away there was a galactic Overlord named Xenu and the it was in a on a planet very similar to earth in the 1950s when it happened that the Scientology was created they had they wore the same clothes they had the same cars and so on and Zeno faced a problem of overpopulation and how can we diminish the number of Satan's on our planet so he brought them in for tax audits and where they were frozen with injections of glycol into the heart and then they were loaded into rocket ships that look very much like DC's threes and flown to the prison planet tteok which is actually earth and they were dropped in to volcanoes and then and hydrogen bombs were dropped in to the volcanoes and they were exploded and their spirits flew out into the ether and their spirits were gathered up in Nets and they were pulled reined in and they were placed in an audience very much like and they were shown images of Jesus and the church and you know pastor oh let's see you know all the things these were called implants and so and in these spirits were floating out there there are thetan and when you are born Satan enters your body like a soul but sometimes more than one gets in there and sometimes hundreds of them do and they account for all the fears and neuroses I hope that's clear it's it's very clear I just should add it was a line in the New York Times review of your book that made me laugh when it said you also say in the book that he came up with these ideas possibly well in a dental chair the founder the founders I had told it was a he was under ether and he was you know he had floated away and he he believed that he had died and gone to heaven and his spirit was floating through these gates and he saw all the answers to life's questions and he was scrutinizing him getting the answers when someone said he doesn't belong here and then he heard this voice calling him back into the dentist's chair right so I think let me ask Alex so I'm just gonna play devil's advocate every religion has some sort of origin story that to rational people today might seem possibly embellished right or it requires so there's faith you need faith to believe in your religion sure so Scientologists they will say about the work that you two have done that you are prejudiced you're biased that you're on a witch hunt that you are discriminating against them so what what is your what is your how do you respond to that they must be suppressive people that's all I can find out no I mean the the serious answer to that is that as Spanky Taylor who's in the film a former Scientologists says it's not the Creed it's the deed that is to say you know one of the things in terms of looking at the practices of Scientology how they're exhibited in the real world in terms of the human rights abuses that we've seen the physical abuse the way that they destroy families through a process of what's called disconnection that is to say if one person leaves the church people who are still inside disconnect from them totally so it's you can separate the belief system from the practices that are pernicious and hateful for example I did a film about the Catholic Church called maximum Pope as you as you noted you know there are many people who identify as Catholics I myself was raised Catholic but that doesn't mean that you need to endorse the rape of children by priests that's a crime and so I think that one of the things that was interesting to me about this topic and was that you know because I had been actually been offered this project many times it sounds like a kind of a punishment in a way but and I turned it down but when I read Larry's book the thing that intrigued me the most was this idea of the prison of belief the idea that when you're self imprisoned the the cell door is open but you don't leave in that in that mental state of belief you can do the most appalling things that you would otherwise consider reprehensible but you do them because under the banner of belief you believe it's somehow okay and and so I just come off of that film about the Catholic Church where I was interested in this process called noble cause corruption the idea that in the service of a noble cause you allow yourself to do terrible things and and and this got me deeper and deeper into that idea so that's a long way around to your question but the way I would answer that in this case is anytime you make a film exposing abuses of human rights it doesn't seem to me a crime so let's then explain something about a little bit about Ella ron hubbard so he in the book why not you the book and the movie are so I mean there's nothing redeemable about him and in many ways the way he treats people he marries multiple women abandons children separates families from their kids that destroys marriages as the stories marriages ISM and and is abusive it's physically abusive and/or orders the physical abuse of people isolates people but explain this how how does he end up with followers how do people are going on boats with him around the world and living in in the bottom and being enslaved basically so explain this I don't know if I can explain it but I can I can take a whack at how I think it comes about I mean first of all I think there is in in Scientology which makes it a bit different than say Judaism or Catholicism where you can explain in a couple of simple sentences the cosmology of of the religion in in Scientology very often people come in off the street and they're told it's an applied philosophy it's not a religion at all it's just something that might make you feel good and there is a process called auditing whereby you're asked a series of questions by a skilled auditor much like a therapist and you hold on to these cans which measure the electrical energy coming out of your body and and by telling these stories or sometimes these secrets as often you do in therapy you feel better well then you come back and perhaps now you'll pay and so you get you get in trance by this idea that you can feel better and maybe it'll make your life better and you'll become more assertive and you know in your everyday life and so forth and so on so I think that's one of the appeals when it came to Hubbard I think one of his great advantages one of the great advantages of him starting a religion was that he was a science fiction writer and he was a great storyteller and he captivated people by telling them these stories so they were feeling good the auditing was making them feel good and he told them these magnificent stories and they were enraptured can i interject something about because I I I don't want to give the impression that I that I hated l ron hubbard as a person or that i think he was in many respects remarkable and perhaps he's you know he his first big breakthrough was a book called Dianetics which is you know absurd it's you know but it was a huge bestseller international bestseller it really kind of created the mold for the self-help book phenomenon after world war ii but i think that that hubbard was mentally disturbed and he knew it and he knew that he needed help he at one point wrote to the Veterans Administration asking for psychiatric assistance and there's no ways no evidence that he got it I think he wrote Dianetics and then later created Scientology as a form of self healing and there's a phenomenon in in Aboriginal cultures you know spirit healers voodoo doctors medicine men you know they're they're often psychologically wounded people and the their journey is they go off on a spirit quest and and then they come back and try to heal their community and you can look at Hubbard's trajectory sympathetically in that perspective I think I think on balance you know that movement has done a lot of harm to people but I don't doubt that it has helped a lot of people - well I thought it you know not to go back to the New York Times review of your book I thought the first line and the review said that lawrence wright is so so he but you can hear the sound of a crack because he's bending as he's bending bending over backwards to be fair be fair there is no judgment and it's just sort of the presentation of facts but in those facts you say if some people who get audited or are employing Dianetics that they actually have these out-of-body experiences and then they feel like a euphoria they that it makes them feel euphoric and so is their what is that is that that is I mean is that credible as I did you as I think I think it's very likely that people have these experiences but what's interesting is that they're the experiences that are expected you know when you get into the Scientology culture you begin hearing about out-of-body experiences past lives and you begin to yearn to have such a thing and then you have such a thing the I'll tell you this this is an example of one story that I heard which is you know bear in mind as Alex told you you know when you're in these auditing sessions you're holding on to these they used to be Campbell's soup cans yes but they're you know these two tin cans that are tied up to a meter and and it registers something is not nothing and so the auditor can see when you're having a reaction and the if you were to go in and Janice you seem upset today what's going on I had a fight with my husband and so you would and you the auditor could see that there's agitation and so tell me the story and tell the story now tell it again and there's a little bit less you know so you begin to D emotionalize some of it and do you recall an earlier instance in your life where that was yes my mother spoke to me in the same language and you know so okay then you go through that and then earlier and you know I don't remember anything else well maybe not you know in this life but in another one you know for instance something we just went through your mind right and so the story I was going to tell you what Scientologists told me that he had a terrible problem with hemorrhoids and he couldn't ever it seemed to be tied to the military had been in the service but if he watched a military parade or a war movie he would have an outbreak and so he got audited on this and they took him back and he realized that during the Civil War he was a boy and he and a friend climbed up in a tree and a patrol came by and as they were you know they were riding by one of the boys moved in a limb cracked and the soldier saw him and they shot him in the ass and he fell down dead and he said once and he said he hadn't had an outbreak since then yeah because he traced it back to this past life experience and for him it may be amusing but the thing that's really important to him is that he lived before right and that that those cans proved it there was scientific proof that he had lived before and if he had lived before he'll live again this is precious news and so you're gonna be very reluctant to let go of that I should say that I mean going back to Hubbard I think one of the things that makes him a remarkable person is that they were definitely a mixture of motives and and his second wife Sarah Northrop he was a bigamist also Hubbard and so I believe he was still married well he married yeah Northrop she says that one of the reasons he started Scientology was to make money because as a religion he wouldn't be taxed and that that was a you know an epiphany that he had and that was always he was always in trouble with the tax authorities and yet flash-forward too close to the end of his life and he's he he believes by this point that there is a couple of pesky Satan's inside him that can't be expunged and so he turned to this guy named sergeant and asked him to turn up the electricity on the meter so much so that it would be shocked into death Sarge step back and just decided to give him a little jolt but that gives you a sense of how the con turned the person who was running a con turned out to be conned by his own religion and became and came to believe it very intense he's been most of his life monitoring his own little internal things in in writing and he holds the Guinness Book of World Records for the number of titles published more than books I think the statistic in the book is that he could write a hundred thousand words a day or something like he was sort of almost manic spire was a physical act yeah can you explain to the audience what the title of the book and movie means going clear in Scientology yeah there's a there's an early stage in Scientology which is the idea is that there your mind is divided into two parts and one is reactive and it's full of the things that frightened you the things that cause you to do irrational things and they're old memories their experiences that you had that that trouble your life and the other is a rational computer like perfect machine and if the idea of Scientology is that you go through those things in your reactive mind and you purge them through that process of auditing and eventually you get completely clear and when you're clear you're you you you don't get sick anymore your your memory is perfect your your your ability to achieve things is you know practically unbounded but that's like base camp for the higher levels they're called the operating thetan levels that a rather pricey right but but that's what you know getting to the going to the clear stage is the goal of every Scientologist so the two of you have taken on this project with knowing walking into this knowing that Scientologists don't like to be criticized the church does not like to be criticized and you have endured I was on the propaganda site about Alex give me earlier today and I learned lots of things that I didn't know about Alex and and you know they they malign his reputation as a documentarian his father and the lots of different things okay so there are also lots of URLs that have somehow been parked with like Alex cabig Alex give me friends calm Alex give me family calm lots of different websites so explain what this has been like I mean I would say that we had some expectation there was gonna be blowback and and there has been but the the amount of blowback which as you refers is is focused very much on on these websites there's a member of the church who's making a documentary about me there's a member of the church who's making or a journalist who works for the church who's writing a book about Larry be fascinating and I'm looking very much forward to seeing the documentary also but I think it pales in comparison to what they have done to the people who are actually in the film they've gone after them much more assiduously you know the the people were in the film have have told us that they're followed a lot by private investigators and private investigators whose job is not to be unnoticed but just the opposite - Hulk around to be to harass and be threatening to them some of them have been threatened with the loss of all of their property their financial resources physical abuse and you see and in the film you can see how under the guise of making a documentary suddenly five people show up with GoPros in their heads making a documentary but the purpose is to harass and actually as Marty Rathbun once told us you know they're really trying to provoke you to hate to hate them to react back and to explode in ways that then they can capture and say see what a what an unreasonable and irrational person is is the the the job is to try to get inside your head and to destabilize you psychologically and it's very and there's a part of the doctrine it's called fair game and the idea is that you can spread and licious lies about people that's fair game anybody who criticizes Scientology must be a kind of suppressive person and therefore undermining something that is so good that you're entitled to do whatever you can to try to marginalize them I like and Alex recently we did we do roundtables for people in in awards contention and Alex you said on our recent one the best defense is to live a public life to be very public about what you're doing and and and that seems they die I feel like the Scientology in their book you talk about them doing things like drowning dogs you know really ruining destroying journalists lives just abuse like destroying people's financial records lawsuits that would bankrupt people so are those strategies not being employed today are they still being employed less so in you know I think the church did not benefit from though that kind of behavior and it but there's a doctrine in Scientology written by l ron hubbard having it called fair game which essentially says that anyone who criticizes the church is a criminal and in worth you know you can treat them in in any fashion you know in order to bring them down the means just yes so that became the you know the modus operandi of the church and it what essentially it did is scared people away and and of course it did create a kind of electric charge around the subject so that really a lot of journalists were anxious about i know when before i started writing about paul haggis who started all this for me i wrote a profile for the new yorker i sat down with David Remnick the editor this is maybe three or four years before that I said I'm very interested in Scientology and and we talked about the fact that Time magazine had been sued for an expose that had been in the 90s and they won at every level they went and went all the way the Supreme Court it was the most expensive lawsuit at that time and it's long long career ever had to defend they won but it costs them and I didn't want to do that to my magazine I didn't want to spend years in depositions and it was so I'm sure every reporter who was considering writing about Scientologists or any publication would have to think is this worth it and that was what the church wanted you and I should say we were bombarded with legal threats by the Church of Scientology I mean there's a stack of legal letters a mile long and every venue that we went to all over the world wherever it was about to appear they were threatened with lawsuits by the church's attorneys and so you know it was the great credit and by the way I should say normally when I do a film like this you know particularly one that that that digs back into the past you know you go to wall than major networks and you ask them to license archival footage or news footage not one of the major networks would license us anything having to do with Scientology so we had to use not fair game but fair use are our weapon against fair game so in order to be able to include those in the film so so definitely they have a legal strategy to come after you and and even some of the outlets that would interview us on the on the PR tour the Scientologists themselves would never appear right but they'd always talk to the legal teams and they'd insinuate with their threats the idea that they had better ask us questions that the Church of Scientology would want to ask but the church would never show up themselves interesting the importance of Hollywood is something I want to discuss Mohali reporter we we had a story maybe two weeks ago about about different voting members of the documentary branch of the Academy which is that's the voting body that decides and who gets nominated for an Oscar and also picks the eventual winner that different members of that voting branch had been called or contacted by Scientologists and that includes Rory Kennedy I think there were at least maybe four names we had named in our story was that effective I mean we got us nominated there might have been a question before the church day right got into it but I'm sure it gets at that point of what you were talking about earlier I think they were counting on the idea that that technique would never be outed right so if you treat all of this stuff in public which is not what they like they like to stay in the shadows then suddenly it's not very effective at all right so let's go let's talk about Hollywood so there are there are two people who have been synonymous with the church in terms of celebrity Tom Cruise and John Travolta so can you talk about the significance that those two actors have played in and the rise of Scientology well when Hubbard started the Church of Scientology he had a very keen insight which is that America really does worship something in his celebrity so he started his church in Los Angeles and he created the celebrity Center in Hollywood and now Scientology is one of the biggest landlords in Hollywood they own many of the landmark buildings in Hollywood some of the premier buildings in fact if you're in Hollywood this Scientology sign just looms over much of the district and so it's like a you know province of Scientology and that was by design and the church early on put out a list of prospective celebrity members and they you know they were Walt Disney and Howard Hughes and Marlena Dietrich I can just back up an ad for those who aren't familiar l ron Hubbard desperately wanted to be in the movie yes yeah he was he wanted to be a movie director and he still have a studio Scientology has a studio that makes of course the attack videos there right you're starring in right so so they had this idea from the very beginning that they were going to bring in these celebrities and they would be great pitchman and and celebrities did did come in Rock Hudson came in for a little while you know some you know Leonard Cohen you know people that you know and and some people got some things out of it I Jerry Seinfeld is not a Scientologist but he took a course that he credits for giving him helping him with his stand-up comedy know exactly what part of it helped him with his comedy but but some important acting school that was run by a Scientology yeah it was very much a feeder into science it was a networking thing at for a period of time in Hollywood right that producers would hire talent that we were Scientologists and it was a referral system and and there's a when actors were lining up to be extras Scientologists had come by and pass out brochures saying how to get an agent how to get ahead and come to the celebrity Center and there would be celebrities there to talk about how the church has helped them and it you know in Hollywood we have all these young people coming and they're risking everything you know so often they they they leave out of high school right their friends are going off to get educated at schools and become doctors and so on and they're going and eating cat food and trying to you know make it as in nobody's paying any attention to them and then suddenly somebody hands you a brochure and says this is your ticket it's very alluring I mean even Paul Haggis he walked into a center and that that's it's often as simple as that yeah so today though given the profile of what you two have done and the sort of volume of information on the internet can they can they still recruit are they na are they Scientology still in a recruitment mode well I think they're in the kind of recovery mode they're trying to they what they have that I think they have a very diminishing body of membership and although it's small the number of people whose lives have been touched by Scientology is quite wide and I'm sure there are people here who whose lives have been touched many of them have been wounded by losing family members or they themselves may have spent years inside the church and then found that it you know that imbalance they had kind of wasted their time so that community there's a much larger community that surrounds it and there was a kind of the the other thing that's interesting about celebrity in Scientology is that there's still quite a bit of power that accrues to the Church of Scientology because of the celebrity and Tom Cruise would be a classic example when he went on his most recent tour of the latest Mission Impossible film there are a number of TV outlets which had to agree not to ask him questions about Scientology so long and in exchange for him actually coming on and showing the clips so that they could get the viewers that they wanted and it becomes there's a certain amount of suasion there we also know that that he would use his clout in the executive suite in ways that were very powerful and scary for a lot of the high-ranking executives in Hollywood oh you know quickly tell us what in the movie and in the book there are some very unflattering portrayals of Tom Cruise in terms of his relationship to David Miscavige the head of the church now and the things he was aware of and and and personally benefited from in relation to the church well there are several things that you know the one is there's an organization called the Sea Org and it's the clergy and oftentimes people who have been drawn into it going as children and they sign a contract for a billion years of service because life is eternal in a billion years you know so they sign up and and you know like this young man that I talked to named daniel Montalvo he's I think he joined when he was like 11 and gets scarcely any schooling he's working with heavy machinery he told me that part of what he did was they help clean out all the asbestos out of this hole tell that they took over in Clearwater Florida without any protective equipment when he was I think 13 he was working in their printing plant and cut off a finger on one of their notching machines and this is I can't understand how the labor laws the child labor laws permit such a thing the church claims that they don't violate any of the child labor laws but the testimony of people like that is quite striking people in the Sea Org who get paid $50 a week were doing favors for Tom Cruise they essentially built this airplane hangar for him for his airplane collection they they took care of his house they outfitted a limousine for him this is all it's unfair to call it slave labor but it's hard to know exactly what to call it because you know these people are indentured to the church and put into the service of making you know painting his motorcycles and stuff like that for him nobody gets more out of the church in terms of that kind of that kind of labor than Tom Cruise and of course he gives a lot and he adds tremendous credibility to it but he's also I think morally responsible for if you know the human rights abuses that we Chronicle in the book and in the movie the church credits Tom Cruise with bringing more people in the church than any other human being and I don't doubt that that's true but if it's true then I think he there's no one that has a greater responsibility than he to rectify these abuses and no one else that I know of could do you believe he has seen the movie or read the book I understand that he read the book and found it very boring and he saw the movie and got really furious I'm told he's seen the movie I don't know it for a fact I found the parts about Travolta sort of heartbreaking actually he has a much more ambivalent relationship with the church and you just you describe the process of being audited where you reveal very personal things but it's not there's no there's no confidentiality necessarily in a legal sense in those sessions these things are videotaped and they're stored in the Church of Scientology and actually at moments when the Church of Scientology is concerned that the person might do things that would damage the Church of Scientology they're heavily scrutinized by by a number of people inside the church so some of these most intimate details secret details about your life are exposed to many people and very often they're used as threats against the people and we suspect that um that John Travolta was one of those I was told by a former member for mercy org member that he had been delegated to or create what's called a black PR packet on Travolta in case he left and by combing through his confessions in these sessions if he if he if he decided to leave they could use this against him right and and the book is to use the word harrowing again describing David Miscavige who I'd like to ask you about quickly before we go to some audience questions we're using gay slurs when he talks about John Travolta and and this sort of prevailing belief that this would what they believed were was Tom was John Travolta personal life would be used against him if he tried to leave which it sounds like he did he at least contemplated distancing himself several times there's a very telling detail in the in the book and the film the the church was terribly concerned you know that Tom Cruise might leave the church because he was under the sway of Nicole Kidman and and after and there's an incident whereby Marty Rathbun claims that Tom Cruise actually was persuaded to you know ask for a wiretap on Nicole Kidman's phone but in addition to that there's there's an episode where they were trying to find a new girlfriend for Tom Cruise from the ranks of Scientology the problem was that she was attached she had a boyfriend so what do they do they go in to the auditing and discover that he had been unfaithful to her which they then disclosed to her they break up and lo and behold he's available for Tom Cruise yep there's some great questions from the audience should we turn it over to these so David Miscavige can you explain who he is to the audience for those who don't know Miscavige is Ryan and rhymes with cabbage he he was a young he was a boy growing up in New Jersey and and I mean actually in near Philadelphia and he had asthma and his father Desai had despaired of any kind of medical treatment so he took him to Scientology and he felt that he was improved and then they went and they joined the Church of Scientology on a 16th birthday and and signed up for the Sea Org on the 16th birthday and he became even as a very young man close to l ron Hubbard and who's had sistent cameraman right in in you know that's the way to get really close to Hubbard is you know to get into the movie business with him so and Hubbard went into hiding in the early eighties pursued by lawsuits and tax complications and so he disappeared and the only person who had access to him was Miscavige and so he would take messages to and from Hubbard and so other people other executives really had you know were you couldn't under the control of this young man and then when Hubbard died Miscavige essentially took over the church and he was still in his 20s and he you know new religions have a problem when when the charismatic founder dies like Joseph Smith and you know will Mormonism and do well in the case of Brigham Young yes you know the David Miscavige is is his Scientology's Brigham Young it would not exist if it were not for the fact that he got the tax exemption for the for the church in 1993 the church at that time Hubbard had decided not to pay taxes which was a bit of a problem because after a while they owed a billion dollars in taxes and they didn't have a billion dollars so it was a it was an existential moment and he the tactic that he used to resolve that was to sue IRS more than 2,400 lawsuits against the IRS and individual agents and the whole IRS structure was quaking under this and they resolved it they decided to forgive the billion dollars and they awarded the church the ability to determine which of his own entities were tax-exempt so that even l ron Hubbard's novels or tax-exempt so is a total victory and and because of that the Church of Scientology is still with us so one of the questions from the audience and we've heard some of this in the news lately because Leah Remini the actress says yes she she's left the church and has a memoir that's filled with a lot of information about her time there and she filed a missing-persons report about Shelly the wife Shelly Miscavige and then there was another headline recently about David Miscavige trying to have his own father killed well there was a it was a private eye was discovered following his father and I believe they discovered a number of weapons in his car as well as 2000 rounds of ammunition so we're uncertain whether or not that man he was on a killing mission but he was certainly armed and and and as for Shelly David Miscavige's wife I'm not sure what year was but is about seven years ago that he sent her away to their several places around the country where the works of l ron hubbard are preserved in nuclear bomb resistant caverns in titanium filled canisters and there's a place near Big Bear in Southern California where is one of those places and she apparently is there there was a cop I understand who went out and talked to her so she's alive he's alive thinks she's alive but she hasn't been seen in public in a long long time okay given Scientology's recent membership decline where do you see the church in twenty to thirty years can it exist without expanding I think it can exist without expanding because of the financial resources actually as a as a business model it may be better if they lose members we just talk about how much money they have they have we don't know exactly how much but we know it's well over three billion dollars now at ten percent that's 300 million a year that's pretty good and I should add that one of Scientology is great in addition to hiring top-flight attorneys who are otherwise respectable they they they they seem to have in their pocket one of the great real estate buyers in the world because you go wherever you go whatever city you go to all over the world they have prime real estate absolutely magnificent and in many countries its its tax-exempt yeah so they're sitting on a huge number of assets that are appreciating the money is making money for them and the few members they have the fewer people they have to minister to though they they claim they're building these structures for the massive numbers of people that there are but if you go into one of these places on announce there's nobody there what are they owned in New York so I'm staying right next door I said HBO put me up and it's on West 46th Street they bought what looks like an old theater but it's a beautiful building right or you know where the Richard Rogers theater is where they're showing Hamilton directly across the street is Scientology there's another place up by where Sheila Evans lives not far from here so we're the two of you ever actually sued and has Scientology continue to pursue any course of legal action we were not sued and they continue to issue threats but but no actual lawsuits a lot of going back even to the New Yorker we we had a mountain of lawsuits threats of lawsuits but it's all been threats one of the dangers of course of suing is that you open yourself up to discovery right which is something that I think is very much in their minds but the threat of lawsuits gets a lot of people to back off and I and I I think on account of Larry writing his book and also the film being produced it's emboldened people to come forward and now you're seeing a lot more people telling stories that they may not have felt safe to tell before this one of our goals was help people not be afraid of Scientology anymore okay here's an interesting question can someone follow Dianetics and not be a Scientologist oh yeah there was a whole I mean before Scientology there was Dianetics and it's sold how many copies Oh millions and millions and and it was contemporary with the hula hoop and kind of like that you know and then it just spread everywhere and there were Dianetics clubs and the idea you know this was an age when you know the country was still rocking from the end of the war the idea of psychotherapy had begun to take hold and yet it was expensive and here was a kind of layman's approach and all you needed usually was a friend who would act as a kind of auditor and you you know work through your and and you know great things were said to be accomplished with Dianetics so it was a tremendous sensation hubbard made millions of dollars and lost them all even lost the name the right to the name Dianetics for a while and that's when he came upon the idea that as a religion would be different but this time he's gonna keep control of it he was a master borrower I mean he borrowed a lot from psychotherapy and a lot of other things and even though you can go into there's a museum in Hollywood which is a it's a it's the Museum of psychiatry and it's like a it's like a Hollywood ala cause it's like a more like a ghost house on Halloween and when I went through it there was these kids in front of me and the smell of pot and Joseph gurbles who was he it was pretty and there are points to be made about psychiatry I you know I'm not and he's had some very awful moments but they in in Hubbard scenario it was psychiatrists and psychologists who are consulting with Xenu and you know they're the ones that created all the evil in the world and it's worth noting that Nicole Kidman's father who is now deceased but was a psychiatrist or psychologist by a well-known psychologist and writer and that they were terrified of that that there was a real problem because he would have been a suppressive person and because of her relationship to him that put her in a you know volatile spot and and therefore Tom Cruise and so they wanted to to try to you know if they couldn't break Nicole's tie with her father then breaking the tie between Nicole and Tom became the next objective and that you know sorry one thing about celebrity popped into my head celebrity can work both ways or fame can work both ways one of the benefits of going clear having been watched by so many people you know there are all these tours and in Hollywood and now part of the tour is you you know there are a lot of people are showing up at the blue building and the celebrity Center and Scientologists are there well welcome what brought you here going clear man it's awesome you want to see more okay what do you think the future of Scientology is post David Miscavige will it eventually become a mainstream religion like Mormonism I think that there's a you know Mormonism is a good parallel and I guess I already have drawn it but Mormonism was the most hated religion in the 19th century it was and they were hounded out of one state after another their leader was assassinated you know it's hard to recapture just how despised because the polygamy because of his anti Americanism and so on and and yet Mormonism changed and you know there was in Mormons they have it's easier for them to change because their leader there is a prophet and receives divine messages and the divine message came down we don't need to be polygamists anymore and also we don't need to be anti-american and so it what it changed into was the most pro-american you know people and now around the world often join the Church of Latter day Saints because it helps they think it's like being an American and so Mitt Romney runs for president and his scarcely commented upon the you know you know this religion with that kind of history it seems they're relevant and it's conceivable that years from now in the post Miscavige era that there could be a Reformation inside the church and the the it would it certainly got the resources and the mighty legal team to keep it afloat if they can just have the kind of accountability that they need Alex who takes over after I don't know I mean I think that at the at the moment the church is such a creature of David Miscavige in fact we're told that many of the letters we received from the PR people who who signed their names the letters are actually written by David Miscavige so he's a complete control freak who's who's Manning you know he's like he's in the boiler room manning every and he locked up his subordinates right you know there's a thing in this base in Southern California called the hole it's basically two double-wide trailers that have been married together and I think in 2007 Miscavige began to incarcerate more than a hundred of his top leaders you know with in you know these trailers with no furniture they're made to sleep on the floor and sleeping bags constantly demanding that they confessed their crimes and there's a lot of physical abuse you know one guy is made to to clean the toilet area with his tongue you know people there are ants all over the place and and it's not for the weekend there are people in there for years and so it's the idea that there's anybody else that is accountable for the Church of Scientology's ludicrous well one of the things when people some people I know who saw the movie they were astonished by the stories that say Marty Rathbun told and some of the people you interviewed but they were also not sympathetic because this is something they walked into willingly you're not you are not a you're not a physical prisoner of Scientology and at any given time you know Marty beat people he did was amenable things and and and to then come out on the other side and and reveal all this a lot of people felt they brought this on themselves is that is that an unfair way to look at this I supposedly brought them brought it on themselves in some way but I think what the what a film in particular tried to do is to show a journey in other words how people were lured in the horrible things that many of them either look the other way about or did themselves and then how they found a way back out and so I think it's easy to say oh look at them look at those weird people but I think one of the most interesting things for me in terms of doing this film was to see how smart how savvy how intelligent were these people that I I interviewed many of them interviewed first by Larry and and how they got sucked into this and then what it took to get out and I think in a way if we're honest with ourselves there's a lesson there for all of us I think it's not just Scientology you know people who are broken in some way or people who are longing for some sort of answers or people who had troubled romances as in the case of Paul Haggis there countless paths into various religious experiences and you know it happens that Scientology has been crafted to appeal to certain kinds of people especially people in the entertainment business especially people in LA and you know there I'm sure there are for instance movie stars who are a Southern Baptist but we just don't know about it it's not a religion that's been designed to appeal to entertainers but and I'm not saying that Scientology is only for entertainers but they use them as as wheedies uses sports stars to sell their cereal this is a good question where maybe in your answer you can talk a little bit how you two collaborated we just saw a spotlight and for those of you who don't know it's a movie about a real it's a movie based on the real-life story of Boston Globe reporters who exposed pedophilia in the Catholic Church it's a great movie we just saw spotlight and it brings out the need for deep research in fact-checking that is vital but it seems to be lacking in modern reporting in the 24-hour news cycle where are the investigative reporters going to come from 20 that's a good question you know we've been through a tumultuous period in journalism and you know going back you know almost 20 years now with you know the economic changes before the internet began to completely reshape journalism there were newspapers of going out of business because of economic problems and and then the internet came along and it just unsettled so many newspapers have gone out of business and those are the roots of journalism so in many respects those roots were pulled up but I think we're coming around to a different model now there's a ton of news available and you know you I think local news is more problematic than in some respects national news but you could your access to news is just phenomenal but then there the problem of supporting the kind of journalism that your audience member is asking about that's more difficult because the institutions that supported those kinds of things had many of them had disappeared or their their economic basis has been so diminished that it's very you know that it's very very difficult these are expensive stories to make and they are you know they when you involve legal consequences you know you have to imagine there are existential questions that news organizations have to ask I would have to say that I mean we've kind of entered what I think in the last 10 years or so the Golden Age of the documentary you know the the form is morphed into a way that's very authored and and and innovative cinematically but I think also in terms of the investigation the ability to go in after the 24/7 news cycle has kind of passed over it left the scorched earth but they dig in underneath and and find stuff that that had been ignored and fine you know there's so much pressure to come up with an instant narrative to explain this explain that you don't have the pundits who come on and said this is what Isis means or what and they're there just shoot they're all shooting from the hip yeah but you come in after the fact and and dig a little bit more deeply and suddenly I think there's a tremendous hunger for that and that I think is one of the reasons for the explosion in the popularity of documentaries in the last ten years so Sheila Nevins who oversaw the dock at HBO she told us that she had a hundred fifty lawyers working on your movie so I'm assuming she had your back she definitely had all I would say that the 150 lawyers was speaking of the 24/7 news cycle 150 lawyers which was a remark that was that spread like wildfire throughout the the printed press was what they say what they call a fact too good to check and in fact there were about three or four really assiduous lawyers Sheila's that was Sheila's playful hyperbole which was which everyone liked so much they just ran with it but there's no doubt that HBO had our back and I think you know there were some attorneys in the Time Warner system who remembered the Time magazine lawsuit and they were very assiduous about both making sure that we were utterly rigorous in terms of reporting and and put us through a very thorough fact-check but once having invested in the idea that we had done our homework and done our jobs properly they really did a great job of being proactive and protecting us and and trying to anticipate the legal moves that Scientology it's hard to imagine another media organization actually that would have fought so hard to allow us to keep what was in the film in the film and and defended it so furiously well you have to credit the New Yorker and cannot also yeah because they they were really stand-up and all the under a barrage of threats and you know you when you have an organizations like these that stand behind you it allows us to do that kind work so people in the audience want to know your favorite film that you have made Alex and what are the two of you going to work on now if you'd like to reveal it here yes I can't I mean I can't pick a favorite film of mine that's unfair that's like how do you pick you know if my trip to al-qaeda right is that your favorite no Blair that's my favorite film of yours but so I'm you know I'm I'm proud of them but anyway what's our next project I'm I'm gonna skate over there okay that we talked about it you think well we would say we're exploring a fiction project together we're not exploring we're doing a fiction project together it's very much fact-based but it's it's a foray into series television that we're working on together and so it's exciting because it allows us to deep deep in you know on a on a factual story that we're both very familiar with and Larry reported on in the past I think that I'm being just vague enough keep it secret but but nevertheless to bring a certain drama to it and a psychological dimension to it that I think will appeal to a wide audience and we're we're also finding a way formally of mixing you know news footage and and and fiction in a way that I think will be very provocative okay intriguing and and just to tell that is how did you two meet and how do you how do you don't live in the same city no how do you collaborate now I mean remove and exact was doing a one-man show called my trip to al-qaeda it started here in New York yeah what's your favorite film of mine I just think is masterly but and I did it at the Kennedy Center in DC and Alex I think came then and we talked afterwards and he thought it you know there was alway in which it could be made into a film and and we traveled together we went to UK we went to Egypt and those are those are experiences that either bond you or alienate you and so we enjoyed each other I think we have very similar temperaments and and similar approaches so we we work together on another project that didn't we didn't make it was another one-man show I'd done about Israel and Gaza but then I sent him the galleys of going clear and as he said he'd been approached about Scientology a number of times so you know we just we work really easily together I think and we trust each other and I think it's a it's actually helpful bouncing stuff back and forth so you know having read Larry's work then I can go off and and do my thing and then spend a good bit of time actually apart not letting him in on what we're doing and that is a certain key moment showing it to him and then he will comment back in terms of this is horrifying I can't believe it you've done and and I'll make you know some changes but but it's it's useful both both spending a good bit of time together intensely talking through some of the themes and ideas and sometimes sources and and and approaches and then I'll go away do my thing for a while and then we'll we'll get back in touch when it's time to look at cuts and I think we'd probably have time for one more question the thing I the audience might find interesting is what happens can you describe the Oscar season process now you are on the shortlist what is this what you've been through it before he's the man oh just what is it like that people here couldn't even fathom in ways people couldn't fathom I mean a dress you're gonna wear I'm really worried about that it's keeping me up at night I guess you know the climate the climate is such then everyone's gonna see your move who hasn't seen your movie everyone's seen it but everyone will go see it it'll be screened all over town and and all these incredible documentaries that usually have a small audience that have been part of the shortlist now getting an audience that sometimes they will not have seen that what they're sometimes they will not get otherwise which i think is the greatest part of it you know it introduces people who haven't seen this stuff to a to a really big audience so you know it's it's both I mean it's invigorating you know to be recognized in that way and so we're going along for the ride okay and you'll do you'll be in Texas for the cattle or my wife would just love to stay home with her we're gonna be on the red carpet deer and we're if that happens if we get nominated it's it's the Emmys were fun and you know it's you know I I've won the the Pulitzer Prize and it's a crystal paperweight the Emmy is just big gold you know it's like you're working in television so it's a funny experience for me because there's a new career in my life and not something I've ever really done my very much of my first time through the process I was nominated for an Ron the smartest guys in the room again won what oh no that was a I didn't was yeah but I was I was really feeling my oats I thought man I'm really hot and I'm walking the red carpet and and this photographer beckons me over I thought of course he's beckoning me over I'm going up for my close-up I got close to him he said we please get the hell out of the way Jennifer Aniston is confident I knew very well oh where you are where I am yeah well I wanted to thank Alex and Lawrence for being here and you know and I hope I see some of you Fanning yourselves I'm sure it's very warm in there and you know I think just from where I sit as an editor to know how hard it is to do this sort of material is really you know extraordinary so I if you haven't please watch please watch the documentary read the book they're really masterful and exceptional so anyway thank you very much thank you for coming you

Channel: 92nd Street Y

Views: 81,826

Rating: 4.7098041 out of 5

Keywords: 92Y, 92nd Street Y, Alex Gibney (Film Director), Janice Min

Id: ndKjDUX0_7o

Length: 66min 10sec (3970 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2015