Inspirational Documentary's: Louis Theroux

In preparation of creating my own documentary I researched existing work to gain inspiration from. Whilst researching I came across Louis Theroux, a British documentary filmmaker working for the BBC. He is best known for his documentary series 'Louie Theroux's weird weekend' and 'When Louis met'. I had been recommended watching these documentaries before but never got around to it, therefore when I heard that I was to create my own documentary I saw a perfect opportunity to do so. Watching his some of his documentaries have given me ideas of how to interview. Theroux's style of interviewing is very captivating; he is smart in the way that he goes about asking difficult questions which often have personal answers to them. He is very persistent in getting the answers to his questions and takes control of the interviews. However, he can sometimes be too persistent in his questioning, to the extent that he in fact offends his interviewees leading to them not wanting to contribute. Although this makes the interviews more entertaining and does often lead to information that may not have been gathered if asked in another way, I am going to avoid being over persistent whilst interviewing. I am however going to replicate his questioning in the sense that he is not afraid to ask difficult questions and takes control of his interviews.

Above is a clip from one of his documentaries about crime in Philadelphia. As shown in this clip, Theroux isn't scared to ask difficult questions and is persistent with getting an answer that is interesting to his viewers. Also, he gains as much information as possible, for example when he was asking whether they would point out a shooter, he then asked why they gave no as their answer by asking it in another way: "What if..". Putting a question in another form such as this is likely to gather more information, in this case the interviewee's hesitate, insinuating that they would potentially in another situation. When interviewing in my documentary, if I do not have what I believe to be a significant amount of information I will use this technique of asking it in a different way (As an analogy for example).

Another thing that watching Louis Theroux documentaries has taught me is that when shooting, I need to be steady whilst using the camera. The cinematography in a lot of his early documentaries looks very amateur due to shaky recording and bad interview shots where the camera moves from interviewer to interviewee. I will avoid these type of shots in my documentary by interviewing whilst sitting next to the camera so that it looks like the interviewee is looking at the camera when really he is making eye-contact.