'Going Clear': Alex Gibney and Lawrence Wright Bring Their Scientology Doc Into Focus

Upon its publication in 2013, Lawrence Wright’s bestselling book Going Clear almost immediately became one of the most comprehensive and authoritative investigations into the checkered past and controversial present of the Church of Scientology. Created by author L. Ron Hubbard in the early ‘50s, Scientology has grown over the decades from a mere philosophy into an officially recognized tax-exempt religious institution that’s worth, by some accounts, up to a billion dollars. But protests have long dogged the Church about its beliefs and practices, with many ex-members alleging widespread physical and emotional abuse.

The spotlight on the Church will only intensify with the release of Alex Gibney’s new documentary, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, an adaptation of Wright’s book made with the participation of the author. (Gibney and Wright previously collaborated on 2010’s My Trip to Al-Qaeda, a filmed recording of Wright’s one-man show.) Premiering March 29 on HBO, two months after its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, the movie covers the early years of Scientology, but its most incendiary material involves Hubbard’s successor, David Miscavige, and his leadership of the Church. The movie also reveals key details about some of the celebrities involved with Scientology — most notably Tom Cruise and John Travolta — and makes a direct appeal to them to acknowledge Scientology’s various controversies and use their influence in positive ways. Gibney and Wright talks to Yahoo TV about the making of Going Clear and Scientology’s role in the past thirty years of Hollywood history. (A spokeswoman for the Church of Scientology says their response to the allegations in Going Clear can be found here.)

Watch the Going Clear trailer:

The Church of Scientology is famous for being very litigious; in Lawrence Wright’s book, there’s a scene where church officials turn up at the New Yorker offices with four lawyers and 48 binders in tow. Did you face a similar legal army while making Going Clear?  
Alex Gibney: The focus of my film is a little different in that I focused on a small group of characters and, in terms of telling their stories, there were a few key people within Scientology I wanted to talk to. At the very end of filming, we reached out to the church and said, “Please provide these people.” They declined to provide any of them, and then subsequently said, “You should sit down with these 25 unidentified people right away to get their point of view.” This was way, way after we asked for the other people and it didn’t seem fruitful at that moment. I think their motive, and this has been borne out in some of the publicity, was to simply smear people. It wasn’t really to provide information that was useful to my story.

Were legal concerns a reason why the documentary doesn’t explicitly comment on John Travolta’s sexuality, which is one of the reasons the book suggests he’s remained with the Church? There’s a shot of a tabloid magazine cover that references his sexual orientation, but it’s never directly stated onscreen.  
Lawrence Wright: The nice thing about a documentary is that it tells a story visually, whereas in the book, I have to write it all out. Here, just a single image can sum up so much. John Travolta’s predicament is something I can really sympathize with if it is as we think — that he really wanted to get out. I know one of the former Church members told me that he was tasked with compiling “Black PR” [negative personal revelations] on him through the stuff that he’d said in auditing. So whether or not he was planning to leave, the fact is he decided not to and it also seems very apparent that had he chosen to leave, the Church would have used that material against him.

How did you get some of the extraordinary footage from internal Scientology gatherings that we see in the movie?
Gibney: From a variety of sources: different parts of the Internet as well as private individuals and elsewhere. What’s in there is a mixture of licensed material and fair use. It came from all over, but it took a lot of spadework.

The rally where David Miscavige announces L. Ron Hubbard’s death is particularly amazing.  
Gibney: He never uses the word death, because of course it’s not a death! LRH has left his body — he no longer needs his body.

The crowd’s response is remarkable as well: They start off nervously laughing, and then end up cheering, not even recognizing the absurdity of what Miscavige is saying.  
Gibney: One of the reasons I structured the film the way I did is to show that Scientology is evolutionary and immersive. If you’d walked in out of the street and saw that speech without having gone through the process, of course you’d react cynically. So we waited until midway through the film to show that footage to give viewers a sense of how it might feel; by then, you have to become immersed, and when you do, things change for you.

Related: Danny Masterson Sounds Off on Scientology Movie

The movie touches on it briefly, but what is the principle behind Scientology’s drive to amass real estate holdings, not only in the U.S., but also overseas?
Wright: The Scientology ideal is to “clear” the planet, which means bring awareness to people all over the world. Their strategy, in part, is to create these extraordinary buildings [in historic areas] that have been elaborately refurbished inside. They’ve done this in Times Square, Hollywood, and Music Row [in Nashville], and the same thinking applies in Europe and even in Israel. There was a scandal in Israel several years ago where the church had acquired a historic building in Jaffa [that burned in a suspected case of arson].

Distilling the book into a two-hour film naturally resulted in a lot of material being excised. What sections did you most regret having to leave out?
Wright: I wish we’d been able to explore the role of children in the Church a little more deeply, especially those who join the Sea Org when they’re really young and sign away their lifetime, or however many lifetimes fit in a billion years. They lose their education, they are impoverished and when the time comes later in life when they decide they’ve had enough and are going to walk away, they have to leave their families behind. That’s the fate of those children if they decide they’ve made a mistake. No child should be allowed to make a fateful decision like that. In talking to some of these children, it’s very clear to me that the Church has been in violation of child labor laws. Where’s the enforcement? I find that very shocking, and I wish we had had a little more room to explore some of those stories. It’s not as if some of the celebrities don’t know about it, because there are pages that attend to Tom Cruise and so on. Does it ever occur to Tom Cruise, “Why isn’t this child in school? Where are his parents?”

Related: Scientology’s Final Say On ‘Going Clear’

In addition to being an exposé into Scientology, Going Clear is also an account of the past thirty years of Hollywood history. As the film makes apparent, so many contemporary movie stars like Cruise and Travolta, as well as filmmakers like Paul Haggis, emerged from within the city’s Scientology community.  
Gibney: I think what Scientology discovered is that the real religion of America is celebrity. If they could hitch their wagon to that star, things would turn out a lot better for them. They had a kind of recruiting system, particularly through [stage director and acting teacher] Milton Katselas’s acting class. Actors, often by professional need, are sometimes very needy and insecure, because they have to be open. I think that it was also smart from an institutional perspective to be able to recruit people by saying, “You need a part, and we can help you get that part.” So Scientology has had a formative role for many people, but there are also a lot of powerful people in Hollywood who I think were scared by Scientology, because it had in its stable some very powerful people. It was very difficult to buck that if you wanted to work with those people, particularly actors, because actors are the coin of the realm when it comes to movies. If you want to get a script made, then you have to attach a major star.

Travolta and Cruise have been public about their involvement with Scientology for some time. It’s always surprising — and sometimes upsetting — to learn that an actress like Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss is also a believer.  
Wright: In her case, she was born into the Church, so there’s a cultural heritage. Most of the people you think of now as younger Scientologists are second and third generation. What you’re not seeing is the new Tom Cruise coming into the Church, although I have talked to some movie stars who came close. It’s alluring, and Cruise himself is the model [for aspiring stars]. All the more reason he bears that responsibility we charge him with [in the film].

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief premieres on March 29 at 8 p.m. on HBO.