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Creator of hit Scientology film Going Clear tells Haaretz why he's no longer afraid. (Israel)
Haaertz: Creator of hit Scientology film tells Haaretz why he's no longer afraid
http://www.haaretz.com/life/movies-television/.premium-1.658338
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Alex Gibney speaks to Haaretz about his new documentary, which exposes the myths and facts surrounding one of the world’s wealthiest cults.
By Ruta Kupfer | May 28, 2015 | 1:33 AM
For years the Church of Scientology was wrapped in a thick cloak of secrecy. Even members were only told years after joining the church about the secret story of its creation — and that was also after they’d handed over almost all their assets to it. But anyone who sees Alex Gibney’s new documentary, “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief,” has to wait less than an hour before learning the biblical-like story behind this “faith.”
It seems that 75 million years ago a powerful alien named Xenu arrived on the planet Earth. The world was then exactly like the United States was in the 1950s, with people, houses and cars. According to the late founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard — who also completely by chance was a science-fiction writer — Xenu brought billions of his fellow aliens to Earth in a spacecraft that looked like an airplane, planted them around volcanoes, and destroyed them with hydrogen bombs.
The dead aliens’ “immortal spirits” become attached to living human beings, damage them and have yet to let go of them. Long-time Scientology members are still busy today trying to get rid of these spirits in various ways.
Gibney presents this whole fantasy in an entertaining visual montage, including commentary by himself and by screenwriter Paul Haggis, who was once a member of the church and is also interviewed in the film.
“Going Clear” is without a doubt the most talked-about documentary of the year. It paints a complex and expansive picture of the Church of Scientology which has relatively few members — about 50,000 people all over the world, including some in Israel — but has attracted a long list of celebrities, amassed a large amount of real estate, and accumulated enormous amounts of cash. Indeed, the film also exposes the inability of the U.S. tax system to deal with that situation.
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By means of his interviewees in “Going Clear” — members who left the Church of Scientology after many years — Gibney exposes the way it works, the physical and psychological manipulations it wields, and its small size relative to its enormous financial assets. HBO, which recently broadcast the film, has prepared itself with an army of 160 lawyers to deal with the expected lawsuits from the church — but for now, it’s paid off with HBO’s highest rating in the past decade.
After the movie aired, the church responded quickly and, as in similar cases, sought to attack it and Gibney in every way possible.
“Look, I’ve been vilified,” he told Haaretz in a telephone interview. “But that kind of comes with the territory. Luckily for me, I’d already gone through the process of being vilified,” he added.
“I was ready for that ... a lot of legal letters coming across. But I think they [officials of the church] save the worst of their behavior for the people that are in the cult. And they came down on them [the interviewees] pretty hard … They hired members from the church to threaten them, sometimes physically… I noticed, in particular, they seemed to focus their ire on the women. There are three women in the film, but two in particular ... They went after them.
“[The officials] seem to focus their rage not just on the critics but on ex-members … The Church of Scientology is not just a prison of belief but in some ways it’s a real prison, because they try to prevent people from leaving. Even the Catholic Church doesn’t do that: If you decide one day you’re not going to go to Mass anymore, they don’t show up on your doorstep with a bunch of people with beards and masks over their faces.
“When I started the Scientology film, the most important thing was ... to understand why it was that smart, discerning people came to believe so intensely in this religion that seems, from the outside, to be the wackiest idea — that beings were dropped in volcanoes … And fragmenting spirits attached themselves to people’s bodies… A lot of it sounds pretty nutty.
“But to understand how people got into it was important to me because I never really got them [before]. And that ended up giving me an insight not only into Scientology but into all beliefs ... So, yeah, I think you want to immerse yourself in these worlds, if you can, to get a better understanding of what’s going on.”
What he found so amazing while making the film, he says, was how much time it took people to disassociate themselves from the church: “One of the things that was most interesting to me was how hard it was and how long it took for people — and I’m using this [phrase] in a perfectly ironic way — to disconnect their minds from the force of Scientology. The prison door was open; they refuse to leave. They don’t want to leave. And even those who decide to leave the religion — it took years and years and years to really reckon with the fact that they believed something that was just nutty, and crazy, and that they had trespassed their own boundaries.”
A lot of this behavior, added Gibney, is related to a sort “of psychology that I think is universal: that we have a hard time seeing or recognizing our own mistakes. .. You’re in the church for 15-something years, and you wake up one day and you’re like: Oh my god, what have I been doing? ... It was fascinating for me, how hard it was to walk out of the prison cell of belief.”
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Haaertz: Creator of hit Scientology film tells Haaretz why he's no longer afraid
http://www.haaretz.com/life/movies-television/.premium-1.658338
* * * * * BEGIN EXCERPT * * * * *
Alex Gibney speaks to Haaretz about his new documentary, which exposes the myths and facts surrounding one of the world’s wealthiest cults.
By Ruta Kupfer | May 28, 2015 | 1:33 AM
For years the Church of Scientology was wrapped in a thick cloak of secrecy. Even members were only told years after joining the church about the secret story of its creation — and that was also after they’d handed over almost all their assets to it. But anyone who sees Alex Gibney’s new documentary, “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief,” has to wait less than an hour before learning the biblical-like story behind this “faith.”
It seems that 75 million years ago a powerful alien named Xenu arrived on the planet Earth. The world was then exactly like the United States was in the 1950s, with people, houses and cars. According to the late founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard — who also completely by chance was a science-fiction writer — Xenu brought billions of his fellow aliens to Earth in a spacecraft that looked like an airplane, planted them around volcanoes, and destroyed them with hydrogen bombs.
The dead aliens’ “immortal spirits” become attached to living human beings, damage them and have yet to let go of them. Long-time Scientology members are still busy today trying to get rid of these spirits in various ways.
Gibney presents this whole fantasy in an entertaining visual montage, including commentary by himself and by screenwriter Paul Haggis, who was once a member of the church and is also interviewed in the film.
“Going Clear” is without a doubt the most talked-about documentary of the year. It paints a complex and expansive picture of the Church of Scientology which has relatively few members — about 50,000 people all over the world, including some in Israel — but has attracted a long list of celebrities, amassed a large amount of real estate, and accumulated enormous amounts of cash. Indeed, the film also exposes the inability of the U.S. tax system to deal with that situation.
* * * * * END EXCERPT * * * * * *
* * * * * BEGIN EXCERPT * * * * *
By means of his interviewees in “Going Clear” — members who left the Church of Scientology after many years — Gibney exposes the way it works, the physical and psychological manipulations it wields, and its small size relative to its enormous financial assets. HBO, which recently broadcast the film, has prepared itself with an army of 160 lawyers to deal with the expected lawsuits from the church — but for now, it’s paid off with HBO’s highest rating in the past decade.
After the movie aired, the church responded quickly and, as in similar cases, sought to attack it and Gibney in every way possible.
“Look, I’ve been vilified,” he told Haaretz in a telephone interview. “But that kind of comes with the territory. Luckily for me, I’d already gone through the process of being vilified,” he added.
“I was ready for that ... a lot of legal letters coming across. But I think they [officials of the church] save the worst of their behavior for the people that are in the cult. And they came down on them [the interviewees] pretty hard … They hired members from the church to threaten them, sometimes physically… I noticed, in particular, they seemed to focus their ire on the women. There are three women in the film, but two in particular ... They went after them.
“[The officials] seem to focus their rage not just on the critics but on ex-members … The Church of Scientology is not just a prison of belief but in some ways it’s a real prison, because they try to prevent people from leaving. Even the Catholic Church doesn’t do that: If you decide one day you’re not going to go to Mass anymore, they don’t show up on your doorstep with a bunch of people with beards and masks over their faces.
“When I started the Scientology film, the most important thing was ... to understand why it was that smart, discerning people came to believe so intensely in this religion that seems, from the outside, to be the wackiest idea — that beings were dropped in volcanoes … And fragmenting spirits attached themselves to people’s bodies… A lot of it sounds pretty nutty.
“But to understand how people got into it was important to me because I never really got them [before]. And that ended up giving me an insight not only into Scientology but into all beliefs ... So, yeah, I think you want to immerse yourself in these worlds, if you can, to get a better understanding of what’s going on.”
What he found so amazing while making the film, he says, was how much time it took people to disassociate themselves from the church: “One of the things that was most interesting to me was how hard it was and how long it took for people — and I’m using this [phrase] in a perfectly ironic way — to disconnect their minds from the force of Scientology. The prison door was open; they refuse to leave. They don’t want to leave. And even those who decide to leave the religion — it took years and years and years to really reckon with the fact that they believed something that was just nutty, and crazy, and that they had trespassed their own boundaries.”
A lot of this behavior, added Gibney, is related to a sort “of psychology that I think is universal: that we have a hard time seeing or recognizing our own mistakes. .. You’re in the church for 15-something years, and you wake up one day and you’re like: Oh my god, what have I been doing? ... It was fascinating for me, how hard it was to walk out of the prison cell of belief.”
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