Watching The Detectives

I tell him this reminds me of Stanley Milgram's experiments where subjects willingly inflicted pain on people (or thought that's what they were doing) because they were told to by characters wearing lab coats. "[Sacha Baron Cohen] and I talked about that," says Charles excitedly, "because it is exactly about that: how people react to authority and tend to fall into line behind authority."

Someone might realise in the middle of an interview that something is up, he recalls, but "what are you going to do? Pull the microphone off and cause a scene, or behave? Most people conform under those conditions and behave." In this sense, he says, films like Borat and Religulous are psychological, anthropological and philosophical experiments. "That's one of the things that really intrigues me about these kinds of projects."

And it is not just the urge to conform that works in the film-maker's favour. Something else learned on Borat, he says, was just how powerful "vanity, ego and hubris" are in our lives. Consequently, he dismisses the oft-made charge that he targets subjects who lack media savvy, particularly when applied to Religulous. "I feel like it's just the opposite," he argues. "They are media whores who can't wait to get on camera and then once they're on camera they get caught by surprise. They want to tell you what they believe. They want to tell you what they think and feel. What they're not ready for is to be asked questions about it and to have to defend those beliefs; they're not used to that."

...While the fundamentalists stick to every word of the Bible, or the Koran for that matter, Maher also meets high-ranking clerics within the Vatican who offer a more enlightened point of view. Stories like Genesis and the virgin birth are merely myths, they say, from a benighted, pre-scientific age. To hold every word as the truth today is absurd.

Charles says that one of the most profound revelations for him while making the movie was the discovery that the story of Jesus is an archetype that had already existed for thousands of years before his (supposed) birth.

Unquestioning fundamentalist thinking becomes most disturbing, however, when it embraces the apocalyptic dimension inherent in most western religions. When religion and politics become entwined, as they did during the Bush administration, the situation becomes potentially explosive. Nuclear weapons, and our ability to destroy ourselves several times over, now mean that Armageddon is just the push of a button away.

"It's very simple for it to happen," says Charles. "I have read a lot about apocalyptic thinking and, from a Jungian point of view, it is almost like an internal thing: we are all living an apocalypse, we're all going to die so, in a sense, you want that to have significance, even if it's destructive significance on some level."

This is why he feels it is necessary for us to talk about these issues openly and honestly, and why he felt an urgent need to make Religulous. "I thought it could be healthy to explore that in a dialogue," he says. "But to be told, 'No, this is the answer. And if you don't believe it, by the way, I'm going to kill you,' that's what the problem is now."

-- Stephen Applebaum, having a conversation with Larry Charles (above) the director of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Religulous," and "Borat," in The Scotsman.

Considering believers even kill each other - simply because they're simple enough to believe - TMR would say the situation is worse than Mr. Charles is letting on,...