成人论坛

1. Jon thinks his anxiety has helped to prepare him for a pandemic

“It’s a strange thing that you spend your life catastrophising in the most, kind of, absurd ways,” Jon says. He describes having “ridiculous, insane thoughts”, such as assuming there had been a terrorist gas attack at his son’s school because it was unusually quiet one day. But Jon thinks these anxious imaginings have made him better able to cope with an actual emergency. So, in the face of the coronavirus crisis, he has felt calm and focused. “It’s like, OK, I’ve been preparing for this my whole life,” he says.

2. Louis says the lockdown has taken some stresses out of life, and added others

While being stuck at home has simplified his life, Louis says he’s also feeling the tension. “I don’t know what I’m feeling half the time,” he says. “And then suddenly I notice: ‘Oh wow, I’m shouting and rushing around and banging things. I think I must be in a bad mood.’”

3. Jon once tried to arrange a night at a haunted house for Robbie Williams, but he backed out

Asked to help the singer sort out a stay in a haunted house, Jon emailed several properties and received incredibly enthusiastic responses. “I felt that they were, like, throwing their ghosts at Robbie as if they were their debutant daughters,” he jokes. In the end, though, Robbie changed his mind, so any spectral pop fans would have been sadly disappointed.

4. Louis finds that editing films changes his memory of events

In the programme Louis and the Nazis, the final cut shows one of the men, Skip, interrogating Louis about whether he’s Jewish. When he watched the full conversation later, Louis realised he had seeded the confrontation by quizzing Skip on whether it would matter if he was Jewish – yet he’d totally forgotten that this happened. “I felt quite pleased with it,” he admits. “Because my biggest fear is that I have no art... So when I saw that I thought, ‘Oh yeah... I actually did kind of make that moment happen.’”

5. Jon gave a militant Islamist extremist a lift to Office World

While filming with Omar Bakri Mohammed in the 1990s, Jon drove him around on errands during interviews, including a trip to get some cut-price photocopying done. Louis says that in the documentary, Omar Bakri came across as “sort of muddled and a bit disorganised”. But it later became clear just how dangerous the extremist leader was, and Jon has since asked himself, “Should I have predicted that? Should I have done the tone slightly differently?” On balance, he says, the film does show moments of threat and unease, and he thinks “it feels OK”.

6. Louis says he still sees Jon as a rival, but Jon says he’s over it

The two men have had oddly parallel careers, exploring lots of similar subjects. When they started out, Jon did think of Louis as a competitor: “I never saw it as destructive, though… because having a nemesis forces you to work harder.” But Louis says he feels more of a rivalry now that Jon is successful in America. In the interests of honesty, he admits that despite his warmth and admiration for Jon, “there’s some nastiness mixed in with it, which I don’t endorse… if I could weed it out, I would do it.”

7. Jon once sneaked into a secret retreat for the global elite with US conspiracy theorist Alex Jones

Bohemian Grove is a camp for the wealthy and powerful which, Jon says, includes a bizarre ceremony “that culminates in a papier-mâché effigy being thrown into a bonfire in front of a giant stone owl.” Twenty years ago, Jon invited David Icke (who claims the ruling elite are shape-shifting lizards in human form) to gatecrash the event with him. But he says Icke refused, warning: “Be very careful – people disappear in those forests”. In the end, Jon infiltrated the event with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. They both survived to tell the tale.

8. Louis missed a chance to witness ‘the world’s only swimming chimpanzee’

When Louis filmed a couple who kept chimpanzees for America’s Most Dangerous Pets, his 2011 documentary which also featured Joe Exotic from Netflix series Tiger King, they were keen for him to document one of the animals swimming in their pool, claiming no other chimp had mastered the skill. But after a quick dip in the hot tub, the creature smashed the window Louis and his team were filming behind, and they decided to make an early exit.

9. The last thing Jon did before the lockdown was get his American citizenship

“I went to the very last flag ceremony,” he says. Jon grew up in Wales, but his family comes from eastern Europe. He says the story is that they were on their way to New York when they ran out of money and had to stop in Cardiff. “So, I guess, like, a hundred years later I completed the journey.”