Louis Theroux is touring Australia for the first time with a retrospective on his work in conversation with Julia Zemiro. Picture: Supplied.

For two-part special Miami Mega Jail, the bespectacled Oxford-educated British filmmaker mixed it up with the worst of the worst. “If you go into prisons they always say ‘Don’t snitch’” the 45-year-old explains on the line from Leeds in Northern England.

Louis Theroux asks tough guys tough questions. Picture: Supplied.Source:Supplied

“I sometimes get accused of being ‘faux-naive’, but for me it’s really just about getting down to the basics of something.

“I remember going into a cell, and somebody had been stabbed the previous week in the cell, and I said ‘Well, who did it?” And there was a sense of like ‘You don’t ask that!’ There was a sense of confusion and outrage. It’s both kind of funny, to address the elephant in the room, and also I think quite revealing.”“It’s a way of keeping audiences involved. I don’t like watching things where I think the people onscreen are ahead of me, or assuming I know something that I don’t know.”

Theroux, who is touring Australia with a retrospective on his films in September, fell into his unique line of work after lying to Michael Moore in 1994 that he’d “loved” the filmmaker’s Roger and Me (which Theroux hadn’t seen) which led to a job on his series TV Nation. He specialised in wacky stories like selling Avon to women in the Amazon or how the Ku Klux Klan was rebranding itself as a civil-rights group. In turn that led to a development deal with the BBC and the comedic series Weird Weekends where Theroux and his “faintly mocking” approach got up close and personal with the most outrageous Americans, from porn stars to UFO nuts, swingers and white supremacists. It’s so popular it still screens regularly 16 years after it the last episode was filmed.

Louis Theroux fell into his unique line of work after lying to Michael Moore in 1994 that he’d “loved” the filmmaker’s Roger and Me (which he hadn’t seen). Picture: Supplied.Source:Supplied

Most of his work has been in the US (he has dual citizenship) and as an “excessively self-questioning and tentative” Brit, Theroux says he has a love/hate fascination with the country and its brash personalities. It’s typified by his feelings about Donald Trump who represents “the ugly side of the American personality yet at the same time there’s a kind of weird, ineffable allure to his sheer chutzpah, his outrageousness. I oppose all his values but rather awfully and embarrassingly, there’s a little part of me that can’t help envying his unselfconsciousness and ... total lack of self-doubt.”

It sounds like he’d be the ideal documentary subject.

“He’d be amazing,” he says, having clearly considered the idea. “He’d be an amazing guy (to film). As scary as it is the idea of him being president, there’s probably a part of him that you would slightly be getting to like.”

Louis follow up series, When Louis Met … (2000-2002) focused on British celebrities including Simon Cowell and the disgraced entertainer Jimmy Savile, who has since been outed as one of Britain’s worst child abusers. Theroux — whose film in retrospect contains some stunning admissions from the Top of the Pops host — is making a second documentary on him. It emerged recently Theroux had reported Savile to the BBC for underage sex in 2001.

Since 2003 he’s been making one-off specials for BBC Two, which have become progressively more and more serious, swapping the weird and wonderful for serious social issues, from drugs to autism, ultra-Zionists to the criminally insane.

Theroux says he has a love/hate fascination with America. Picture: Supplied.Source:ABC

He’s also started to reveal a little more about himself onscreen. In last year’s special Transgender Kids, which examined how kids as young as five are now transitioning, he told a transgender girl who was expressing anxiety about her future, that between the ages of 14 and 15, he’d never felt “more profoundly alone” and that it was “one of the most difficult years of my life.”

Theroux admits he’s always felt like something of an outsider — which may be why he so successful manages to navigate the fringes of society and empathise with its inhabitants.

“I think everybody carries a slight sense of being different, and I know that it comes very naturally to me. I didn’t think ‘I’d really like to work in TV, maybe I could carve out a niche where I talk to people who are somehow involved in marginal or difficult lifestyles …’ It was something I gravitated to very naturally as a subject area, almost instinctively, and somehow turned into a TV career without meaning to.”

Louis Theroux is one of the world’s most popular documentary makers. Picture: Supplied.Source:Supplied

A decade or so ago Theroux used to claim he’d invented his slightly bumbling and inept persona for the Weird Weekends series, but says he’s since come to the slightly depressing conclusion that it was him all along.

“Sometimes I try to imagine that I’m forensic and shrew and maybe even a little bit suave, that I’m capable of being that, and then I catch myself on camera … and I have a moment of self-awareness when I realise I am a slightly bumbling, dysfunctional guy and I think … I guess I’m OK with that.”

Theroux’s September tour will see the filmmaker reflect on his work in conversation with Julia Zemiro, inspired by some one-off Q and A appearances he made in Britain that Theroux enjoyed very much. “It’s quite special for me because I finally get to meet the people who are watching the shows,” he says. “I could have a show that goes out and is watched by 5 million people and I just watch it on my sofa at home and get a text from my Mum saying ‘Oh, that was a good one’.

“So it’s really exciting and fun and it’s a chance to revisit old shows, old memories. It’s a weird thing what I do, there’s a lot of intimacy, there’s lots of emotion that takes place during filming while I’m getting to know the people and it’s nice to dip back into that and try to make sense of that.”

See Louis Theroux

WA Perth Riverside Theatre, September 22

VIC Melbourne Hamer Hall, September 25

NSW Sydney State Theatre, September 27

SA Adelaide Festival Theatre, September 30

QLD Qpac Concert Hall, October 1

Tickets on sale March 21

louistherouxlive.com.au