Louis Theroux says he would like to make a film about Australian Indigenous culture. Photograph: Freddie Claire/ BBC

After just a week in Australia, documentary film-maker Louis Theroux is surprised at how invisible the Indigenous community is.

“I’ve been struck by how I’ve been here for nearly a week now and I feel I’ve clapped eyes on maybe one or two Indigenous people,” the British journalist told Guardian Australia from Melbourne where he is appearing in his first national speaking tour, Louis Theroux Live.

“But the condition of the Indigenous people of Australia is massively fascinating. I’d like to see how they are living; the experience of racial mixing or conflict such as it is and where it is taking place.”

The lives of Indigenous people and the isolation of the outback are two of the aspects of Australia Theroux may one day explore in film, in the same way that he has shone a light on the more curious aspects of American society.

“I’ve mentioned at a couple of shows that I’d like to do something on Indigenous culture and it gets applause,” the 46-year-old said. “It is on people’s minds; people are conscientious about it. But I also feel that it’s kind of out of sight. I am not visibly confronted with it.”

Theroux, who has appeared in Perth and Melbourne, with Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide to follow, is amazed at how Anglo-Saxon Australia still is, in comparison with the multicultural face of his homeland.



“As far as the sort of the genetic stock that I am coming in contact with, it feels like it has 90% sprung from the UK and Ireland and it’s very, very striking,” Theroux said.

“Big time! In west London where I live, white people are a minority. In the area I am in, which is the borough of Brent, whites are less than 50%. So I am used to being just one of a number of shades of people so it feels quite different over here.”

Theroux is yet to turn his attention to Australia in the dozens of documentaries he has made in the past 20 years but he has an abiding interest in the outback. Local documentary filmmaker Dennis O’Rourke is a favourite: in particular his work Cannibal Tours (1988) and Cunnamulla (2000).

“I am always drawn to things that feel different to what I would experience at home; things that offer a combination of unfamiliarity and a sort of bleak glamour. I think the outback has that.

“I’ve seen things about the opal mines of Coober Pedy.



“Cunnamulla is a beautifully bleak portrait of a lonely town in which people are leading lives of sort of quiet desperation. I would love to make a film in the outback or in Papua New Guinea, in Port Moresby. I know that it’s not in Australia, but it’s not too far.



Theroux says his familiar bumbling style is just how he is and that he is an anxious person by nature.



“I think I went in to be as nice and as adaptable as I could be in order to assure the person and get them to like me and get them to open up,” he says. “It was only really later I realised it was a powerful way to open up. The instinct was more humanistic than professional, but it turns out paradoxically to be a great way of getting to the story.”



Theroux has moved away from the paedophiles, porn stars, hardened criminals and religious extremists in his earlier work, towards people afflicted with a medical condition or families facing huge challenges such as autism, dementia or a transgender child.

He says films about the latter are more difficult to make because they don’t immediately appeal to an audience who love to watch those “crazy guys in that cult” or others on the fringe of society.

His most recent films to be screened in Australia on Foxtel, A Different Brain and Drinking to Oblivion, are about people with brain injuries and people addicted to alcohol. They are “slightly more nuanced and arguably sadder”, he says.

“I find the medical films equally fascinating but I can see that they are not always as natural a draw for the audience … I never want to bore the audience. I don’t want them to think, ‘this is a worthy subject, I should watch it’.

“I just want them to sit down and enjoy it and be challenged and engaged and stimulated

Theroux agrees that his films, no matter the subject, try to show that everyone is human, and encourage us to see ourselves in everyone.

“I just try to open it up in a human way to show how the challenges take so much out of the people involved in it, both people struggling directly with the condition and the families of those people. It’s the most human thing imaginable.”