The crowd was buzzing before last night’s Film Independent at LACMA screening. Outside, a standby line stretched down the museum wall and out to Wilshire. Inside, men in suits lined the walls of the Bing Theater. But the only disgruntled scientologists who spoke out at Monday’s screening did so from the screen. The only charges of falsity were leveled by the brave men and women who escaped from the “prison of belief.”

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief is the full title of Oscar winner Alex Gibney’s recent documentary. Both Gibney and Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote the book on which the film is based, were on hand for the event.

The film was rumored to be a sensational outing of a religion long cloaked in secrecy. And while the doc was a take-down of a corrupt institution, Gibney spent a large portion of the Q&A not trashing Scientology, but championing the individuals who had the strength to leave it.

“Part of the courage of the people who are in the film is that ability to look at what they did and be self-reflective,” said Gibney. “To examine your own beliefs and understand that what you’ve done may have been wildly wrong, that’s a very hard thing for all of us to do.”

In addition to charting the history of the Church of Scientology, the film is the first-person account of eight former church members, some of them leading officials, who went through that process of self-examination and decided they wanted out.

The way to do that was the same way they got in. “The way in was through talking [auditing, what Gibney called “the Scientology version of therapy”], and the way out was through talking,” said Gibney. “It’s the same, expressing what they knew and trying to help others by speaking out.”

Wright said one of the subjects of the film, Oscar-winning writer-director Paul Haggis, wasn’t fully ready to denounce the institution when he was initially interviewed.

“He was willing to talk about it, but there were things he was protecting,” Wright said. “For instance, he didn’t want to talk about the creation myth. He was still mentally in Scientology, and he hadn’t allowed himself to ask the questions that I was asking of him.”

Wright and Gibney mentioned several factors that made leaving the Church of Scientology especially difficult for its members. Not only did they face intimidation blackmail from inside, but once they were out, they were separated from their entire family. Often flat broke, they had to disassociate from a way of thinking that had shaped how they interacted and communicated for years—in Haggis’ case, 35 years.

“It takes a while to adjust,” said Wright. “It’s like learning a new language.”

Before Going Clear was a film or a book, Wright was working on a profile of Haggis for The New Yorker.

“Fact checking is something we take pretty seriously,” he said. “The first fact checker worked six months, just on that story. Eventually we had six checkers, and the first volley of questions was 970 queries to the church.” Their questions prompted a delegation—Scientology’s International Spokesperson Tommy Davis, his wife and four lawyers—to come to The New Yorker. They brought with them 47 volumes of material.

Wright was elated to have even more information to work with.

“During the bathroom break, my editor, David Remnick, called me aside and said, ‘You know what you got here, you schmuck, you got a book.’”

Without the Church’s unintentional aid, Going Clear might never have happened.

Both Wright and Gibney were particularly excited to be showing the film in Los Angeles.

“The crossover between celebrity and spirituality is nowhere more interestingly explored than in Scientology,” said Wright. “It was set up here in Los Angeles with the celebrity center in Hollywood in order to exploit the one thing that Americans really do worship, which is celebrity.”

The film deals with two of the Church’s leading celebrity members in particular: John Travolta and Tom Cruise. But in Wright and Gibney’s sensitive hands, the viewer ends up feeling not judgmental of them, but pity for them.

Gibney said that was always his goal. “I think it’s very easy for some of us, from afar, to look at Scientology and say, ‘Well, look at all those crazies.’” Instead, Gibney wanted to show how we’re all susceptible to the pitfalls of unexamined living.

“I think we’re all prisoners of belief in some way, shape, or form at one time or another in our lives, whether it be political belief or religious belief,” said Gibney. “We’re unwilling to reckon with where that may take us. In another context… we would look at some [of our decisions] and say, ‘No I’m not going to do that.’”

Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief opens in select theaters Friday. It premieres on HBO on March 29.

Tom Sveen / Film Independent Blogger