Scientology documentary at Sundance; singer Jamie Cullum

In Bristol [England], around the time I was just pre-teens, my brother was a teenager and very heavily involved in the music scene. Things were happening, a lot of DJ culture, sample culture, drum-and-bass, bands like Portishead were just coming out...it's a long way from jazz, you'd think, but actually a lot of the stuff that was being sampled in that music was jazz.



I would hear names like Herbie Hancock, Miles Davis, George Duke...and at the same time, Ben Folds was playing the piano. I know he's obviously not jazz, but that's how the piano came in. Harry Connick Jr, I saw him doing his New Orleans funk stuff, really before I saw him doing his big band things.



I heard a DJ drop in "See-Line Woman" and "Funkier Than a Mosquito's Tweeter" from Nina Simone, and all these things sort of gradually joined the dots for me and I started getting interested in jazz. 

This was a slightly different process than normal, although it does bear the stamp of my other records in the sense that it's quite a wide girth of choices. But this album was really a collaboration with a producer I met, called Ben Lamden, who is a great young U.K. producer who discovered jazz in a very similar way to me. So we're kind of both record geeks.



This album was made in two-and-a-half days. We recorded it live, on the floor, all in one room —  no separation, no over-dubs — all into an analog tape machine. What you hear is either a first or second take. There's no editing.



There was a lot of beer drunk when we were making it. The point was to keep it very loose and very dirty and in the spirit of the way these [old jazz] albums used to be made.

I am lucky in the sense that...I've got the kind of fans that now tend to be interested in the various things that I'm doing. Whether I'm releasing a jazz record or a more original pop-infused record, they tend to be onboard.



But [record] labels need things now that work on radio. And if you call them up and say, "Look, I'm going to make a slightly esoteric jazz vocal record that isn't going to necessarily be like a Michael Bublé record," for example — this is not that type of record.



So I made this record before I even told [a record label] about it. I just thought, Well, I'll make it because I want to make it.



I made [this record] for me. I didn't know what I was going to do with it. I didn't have a label for this record...I had no idea how it was going to come out when I made it. I just knew I wanted to make it. And, fortunately, over the last 10 years, I've had things that have worked. You never know, and you just have to keep searching.

Great publicity. You can’t buy that. Well, they could — and we were the beneficiaries.

I didn’t see any presence last night [at the screening], though I’m told the producer of "Battlefield Earth" was there. [Editor's note: "Battlefield Earth" was based on a novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and starred church member John Travolta.] But so far, no, we haven’t seen. We keep expecting to see. I’m told some of the participants in the film said that [private investigators] showed up at the airport and photographed them when they were arriving [in Salt Lake City].

We’d gotten a lot of cards and letters prior to the film from lawyers and PR reps from the church. And we reached out carefully to a small number of people who had direct relevance to the film and asked them for interviews, but they all declined.  

Not anymore, because now that it's been seen I feel that any attempt to do that will ultimately backfire. There are a lot of people [that] feel the church is trying to muzzle critics, and we did encounter that. Indeed, we were not able to license any material from the big networks — American networks. They all felt it was too legally difficult for us to license that material, which I found astounding since I licensed all sorts of materials from the networks for many, many years, but this one thing — Scientology — seems to be the red button.

That’s right. Legal restrictions, they say. They wouldn’t say anything past that.

I knew Larry from before. He and I had done a film together called "My Trip to Al-Qaeda," based on his one-man play, which was all about the writing of the book, "The Looming Tower," which won a Pulitzer Prize. And then when he was working on this book, he sent me the galleys, so I saw it in advance. I had been offered to do Scientology films before and I always shied away from it. Not out of fear, but I wasn’t sure it was a story I wanted to do. But Larry’s book convinced me it was worth doing. And one of the reasons was this whole idea of the prison of belief — this notion that smart people can get seduced by a system of belief and end up doing the most appalling things that they never would have considered otherwise.  That was really interesting to me because it’s about Scientology certainly, but it’s also about all sorts of other things in terms of any kind of fundamentalist belief ... where people lose themselves and suddenly lose their rudder because they’re in this prison — this mental prison of belief.

It’s hard to say. That’s what’s so interesting about it, it’s hard to generalize. A number of people that we’ve talked to, of course, got in [during] the '70s. At the time, Scientology was like religion without God. And that was appealing in the counterculture era. But I think a lot of people got in for all sorts of other reasons because there is a kind of bait-and-switch that goes on with the church. You enter and they tell you, "Look, this is an applied philosophy — take what you want and leave the rest." And you start this "auditing," which is a kind of therapy — it’s like Freud’s talking cure. You start to feel better. [Then they say], "Well, [if] you'd like to feel more better, how about paying a little bit more money?" And the next thing you know, you’re in. And when you get to a certain level, you start to see the theology and the wild cosmology of the religion, but that happens a long way down the road and after many, many thousands of dollars.

That’s exactly right. And then people begin to really internalize that. So, if something good happens, they [think], Oh, gosh it’s all due to Scientology.

The big thing was to find a sort of visual way, and the key thing for us was the E-meter [used in Scientology training], this needle that goes up-and-down depending on what you’re thinking. Because that testifies to how people got in. It does measure things. And I’ve seen skilled auditors surprise people. In fact, one of the associate producers of the film, Lauren Wolf, who also worked with Lawrence Wright, was surprised at how effectively it was able to track certain of her thoughts in the hands of a skilled auditor asking the question.

I think there are two things: One is that it’s the feeling of being inside the church. And that comes from the footage and the photographs that we were able to collect, so you get a visceral feeling of what it’s like to be inside. That’s really important. There are some things that are in the film that weren’t in Larry’s book, like the recollections of Hubbard’s second wife, Sarah Northrup; and, also, revelations about a wiretap of Nicole Kidman done at the behest of [current Scientology leader] David Miscavige.

Nicole Kidman’s father was a psychologist, a well-known one in Australia. To Scientology, psychiatry is like Satan. They were afraid that she was taking Tom away. And ultimately they tried to cast her as a suppressive person. A suppressive person in Scientology is one who is un-redeemably evil. They were afraid that Tom was going to leave the church.

Correct. What they tried to do was, through auditing, to get his head away from Nicole, to literally turn their children against her and tell their children she was a suppressive person. And in addition, Tom was — it has been written many times — concerned about Nicole Kidman’s possible infidelities. According to Marty Rathbun, who used to be the number two person in the church, he had a conversation with David Miscavige and Marty [said], "Tom wants me to wiretap, this is ridiculous." And Miscavige said to him, "Get it done."