I’m not sure I can think of a film released in 2016 that I’ve gotten more questions about leading up to its release than TICKLED, the extraordinary and paranoia-inducing documentary that profiles New Zealand journalist (and co-director, along with Dylan Reeve) David Farrier, who wanted to find out more about the phenomenon of competitive tickling videos and ended up unlocking a major empire whose retaliatory capabilities and resources are unmatched in the world of cyber-bullying and “doxing” (the publishing of private information about an individual on the Internet, typically with malicious intent). Most people asking me about this film aren’t aware what TICKLED turns into.
I first heard about TICKLED at the Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered this year. I didn’t get a chance to see it there, but I ended up on a shuttle bus between screenings with a publicist friend who was working the film, and he asked me simply “Have you heard of this film?” He went on to tell me that the directors brought extra security with them to Park City, and somehow everybody involved agreed it was a completely rational thing to do in light of the direction the movie takes in its second half. My favorite docs are those that start out about one thing, but the filmmakers are smart enough to let the story guide them rather than them trying to steering the film in a certain direction. Watching TICKLED is to go careening toward the unknown, and it’s genuinely scary at time.
I had a chance to sit down earlier this week with David Farrier in Chicago, in the days leading up to the film’s Chicago release. Just days earlier at the Los Angeles premiere, some of the unwitting subjects of the film showed up and confronted Reeve about the substance of the film, and you should watch those videos only after you’ve seen the movie. They’re wonderful, as is TICKLED. Please enjoy my lengthy chat with David Farrie, and don’t feel silly asking for a ticket to this film…
Capone: My first exposure to this film, I didn’t see it at Sundance, but I was on a bus with a publicist that I knew who was working it, and we were just going from one screening to another and he just said, “Have you heard of this film TICKLED?” and he starts to describe, not so much the movie, but—
David Farrier: —things surrounding the movie?
Capone: More about that you had security with you, and that you were genuinely concerned for your safety. And I’m like, “What the hell are you talking about?”
DF: Yeah, it's called TICKLED. Why is that necessary? [laughs]?
Capone: I kept hearing about it from that point on. I help program a festival that happened in May, and I lobbied hard for this movie once I saw it. I think the consensus was we had too many documentaries at that point.
DF: There are too many good documentaries. It’s a neat world we live in. I’m going to go see WEINER tonight. I missed it at all the festivals, so I’m finally going to go see it.
Capone: Like your film, it’s another one where you cant believe you’re watching it as it’s unfolding. Let me ask you this: If Jane O’Brien Media had responded to you initially on Facebook in a polite manner…You wrote them a letter and said “Hey, I’m looking into this.” You weren’t investigating them, you just thought it was a funny thing. If the had responded with something polite, would you have just said “Okay, Next subject.”?
DF: No, you’re bang on. You know this. I am in a newsroom where we have a daily turnaround—it’s almost a 24-hour newsroom—and my whole job is just to push out stories. If they had just said “We’re a bit busy” or “We’d rather not do an interview now, can you just try in a month,” I would have just gone “Oh, bummer.”
Capone: Or even something more practical like “We’d love to help, but we have this privacy thing with the participants and our users.” You’d go, “Of course.”
DF: No, completely.
Capone: There were so many other ways they could have responded.
DF: Yes. It was one of the most inflammatory responses. And it wasn’t just in a private email to me. This was on a Facebook wall that had 20,000-plus likes. So it wasn’t just an email; so they were saying this to everyone who could read that. Plus, that was a huge dissonance with the content of the videos, which seemed to be a bit homoerotic.
Capone: Or at least playful and lighthearted.
DF: Playful, right. Not that “We will not deal with a homosexual journalist.” Then suddenly, are they googling me now? It was very unusual.
Capone: You say in the film that the kind of writing and news videos you do are more about subjects things on the edge or fun, wacky things. Can you give me some examples of things that you’ve covered?
DF: Primarily, I produce minute-and-a-half reports for TV about subcultures and anything in the world of pop culture. So it might be traveling to L.A. to do a film junket with an actor or something and to produce a little thing about that. So very mainstream entertainment things like that, or I will talk to a survivalist who has gathered too much junk in his backyard, and the council’s trying to evict him. There’s one story I did a long time ago that got picked up on some American press, which is like the ultimate version of the strange stories I do, which is a guy in Florida who wrote a book about having a six-month sexual relationship with a dolphin.
Capone: I totally remember that. Holy crap. And there was some question as to whether that was real or not, right?
DF: Totally. So I go from incredibly mainstream journalism, like interviewing Justin Bieber when he’s in town, to a guy in Florida who’s having sex with a dolphin. So that’s kind of the gamut.
Capone: And most of these you do on camera. So did the filming that turned into TICKLED start out as one of these reports?
DF: Yeah, so when I saw this I thought “Okay, there’s tickling videos on the internet, so I need pictures. I need to interview the organizers on Skype, and maybe I need to get a competitor to talk about it, then I’ve got my two-minute story that will air on New Zealand TV. From there, no one would talk to me, and so I started blogging about it for my news website, because these emails and Facebook posts were so wild, I just started just doing as a really—I shouldn’t liken it to “Serial,” but as it happened, I would tell the story.
So I did a series of three blogs, and people really enjoyed reading about it that way. So as I was discovering it and looking into the story, I would start a new blog, and people were on the journey, like they would be with something like “Serial.” And that’s where I thought, “Okay, shit. I’m not the only one interested in it.” So when it came time when they were sending us legal threats and they sent those three guys from New York to New Zealand, I thought “Shit, this has gone from blog territory to we should start filming this and do a Kickstarter to fund it.” It happened very organically.
Capone: When did Dylan become a part of this?
DF: Quite quickly. I had maybe written one or two blogs by the time Dylan became involved. We weren't best friends. We were friends on Facebook and Twitter. We knew of each other and liked what each other did. And he saw a screen grab that I posted on my Facebook wall of that first exchange, and he just thought “This is weird,” and he started poking around into the website, and he started blogging on his personal site. So I did three blogs on our official news website; Dylan was posting on whatever his website was.
Capone: Was Sundance the first time you realized there were legal against you?
DF: We heard from lawyers from right at the beginning who were sending essentially cease and desists—“Stop writing about us.” So that happened right at the beginning.
Capone: But that was strictly about the blog.
DF: Right, that was about the blog, and that kept happening a little bit throughout production. We didn’t get served anything at Sundance. We got served with two lawsuits when I was at True/False [Film Fest] in Missouri. I had slipped out to a filmmakers reception, and a woman tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Are you David Farrier?” I thought it was someone who wanted to talk about the film, so I was happy, of course, because I wanted to talk about this thing I made, and I said, “I’m David Farrier.” And she said, “You’re served.” And that was a lawsuit that was served for Utah, for Sundance, and in Missouri for True/False. So two of them there.
Capone: So anywhere you go to screen it, there’s going to be somebody there.
DF: That’s the thing, strange things have happened the whole time. In Missouri, we noticed a couple of guys int he third or forth row back. One of them was holding a coffee cup, and he looked like a hardened New Yorker—it’s hard to explain. He didn’t look like someone from Missouri at a film festival, and he was holding this coffee cup, and he would move his hands, but he would never move the cup. Security was like, “I think he’s recording from that coffee cup,” which ironically is something I do in the documentary as well. And venue security went in and tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Are you recording?” And they refused to answer or leave. So we stopped the film, the police came in, the police removed them, and they were two private investigators from New York that had been hired by somebody to go to Missouri and do what they were doing. So there’s another example. So the whole time stuff has been happening.
Capone: I saw the video of what happened…
DF: On Saturday in L.A.?
Capone: Exactly.
DF: I was in New York; Dylan was in L.A. We thought something might happen at one of those screenings; we did not think all the primary cast would turn out and very publicly, again, threaten us with legal action in front of an audience that was spellbound that this was happening.
Capone: That would be the weirdest thing to be in the audience and suddenly turn around and see those figures watching it.
DF: Completely. Watching it with them and then staying for the Q&A and actively getting involved in that. To have the central character in your film turn out and threaten you legally at a Q&A was just unusual.
Capone: Are you documenting the Q&As at this point?
DF: We’re filming some of them. Yeah, we’re keeping a [record].
Capone: Yeah, absolutely. I hope so.
DF: Magnolia has done a phenomenal job of promoting this film, in that they’re not giving away the biggest secrets. I know so many people who are dying to see it when it opens this weekend and they don't have a clue what it’s about. I can tell. I say to them, “What do you think it’s about?” And they say, “Oh, it’s a tickling videos.”
DF: “Weird tickling competitions.” Right.
Capone: And I say, “Yes, go in with that. That’s what I want you to think it’s about.”
DF: That’s the ideal audience.
Capone: Did you have any control over that aspect of the marketing?
DF: Yeah, completely. Magnolia had been fantastic the whole way through, and we had discussions early on about how we would put the film out. But I think we were on the same page straight away, because they understand films, and they understand you want your audience to go on a journey, and we were both on the same page that we need to put it out that it’s tickling but it goes somewhere else and not go beyond that. They’re smart people, and it wasn’t like we were arguing over how we would put this film out there. They were on board.
Capone: If you could have anticipated where this went and how much it would start to impact your life personally and professionally, would you have embarked on this journey?
DF: I would have had second thoughts about it, but I’d like to think I would have still done it, because it’s been a wild ride and there’s a lot of things that have been incredibly stressful about it, but at the end of the day—and I think Dylan would say the same thing—we’re proud of what we made.
Essentially at the beginning of this whole thing, we saw something that seemed like it wasn't right, and there was an injustice there. It seemed like our only tool to potentially do something about it was to tell that story in a way that would be absorbed by people in a way people could understand what was happening, because it’s an incredibly complicated thing from afar. If we hadn’t told the story, you couldn’t find out by Googling about it. This is two years of our lives with some pretty crazy and intense stuff happening to us and to other people. You get to see that in 90 minutes to see that. Exposing this world was really important to us.
Capone: What lessons do you want people to take away from this. Is there a cautionary tale here? I ask because I doubt there are going to be a lot of people who follow this exact path of getting cyber-bullied.
DF: I think there’s a general cautionary tale, and it’s a story we’ve heard again and again, but it’s being aware and being cautious on the internet, especially internet natives. I didn't grow up with the internet from day one. It came into the world when I was about 15, I feel like I was getting online. Even people growing up on the internet can still be tricked by various ways. I think that’s really important.
I think people should think a little bit about how important it is to not bully people and to let people be themselves as well. That’s incredibly important, because that’s very cyclical. Also, I hope people think a little bit more about the power structures that exist in the Western world, especially what we encountered in America, where if you’ve got funds and you’ve got money, that also gives you an incredible amount of influence and power over people who don’t have money, and I think that’s a system that is broken, and we need to be aware of it.
Capone: The lesson I learned is that key to defeating something that dwells in the shadows is by throwing a light on it. That’s all you do is show us what's behind that curtain, and its power is diminished. It’s not gone, but it’s diminished substantially.
DF: And that was our intent, so I’m really glad you felt that.
Capone: To add to that, I was so impressed with your investigative skills in this. Where did you learn to do that? Because I’m guessing what you did before didn’t require as much digging.
DF: No, it didn't. But I have a huge interest in documentary and current affairs. And I was very lucky, in the newsroom, I would often work next to our current affairs team and I would very closely watch how they did things, whether it was how they went about recording a secret recording, or how they went about just longer-form storytelling. Dylan also brought incredible things to the table. His online sleuthing skills were amazing. Our skills are very complimentary, and I think together we did something we couldn’t have done separately. I genuinely believe that. But personally, I absorbed a lot of things from the newsroom, that’s why I find it so sad that newsrooms are getting cut back and back and back. That investigative thread in newsrooms is more difficult to sustain.
Capone: How did you protect yourself and your sources from further doxing, even now?
DF: The people who spoke to us on camera, we made them aware of the situation. It had already happened to them in a way as well. We were just very careful with sources. A lot of people spoke to us off the record. A lot of our research was done as backing up of what you see in the film. We’ve got a lot of interviews that were off the record, so we protected them. We made sure everyone was very aware and everyone knew what they were coming in for, and we were super aware about information we gave about certain people and things.
Capone: Was there a specific incident during this investigation, the travels or your interviews that you realized that you had crossed into the rabbit hole?
DF: There was a specific moment that spoke to me when I meet a journalist, Debbie, who was looking into a similar story back in the ’90s, and I’m interviewing her. Most interviews are a one-way thing—you’re learning from them. It’s very one way. With her, because my story echoed what she had gone through, she was learning from me at the same time. So there was this real back and forth, and there’s a moment when I hand her some letters that tie into what she discovered and tied directly into what I had discovered, and it was just a eureka moment for both of us. It just felt really powerful because we were trying to link up certain facts, and she was linking those up at the same time. That was really an enjoyable moment.
Capone: That must have been really crazy to realize it had been going on that long.
DF: Yeah, the scale of it. Jane O’Brien Media has existed for around three years, and that seemed like a long time. But then we just found the story stretched way back, over two decades now.
Capone: I think if I remember correctly, I noticed that you used some music cues from UPSTREAM COLOR. How did that happen?
DF: For sure. I loved PRIMER. Like many people who saw that, they were just blown away. So UPSTREAM COLOR is probably one of my favorite films. I find it very powerful, and it’s also thematically, probably coincidentally, has similar themes to TICKLED, like power and control. But I loved this music. When we was cutting it, Simon Coldrick edited the film, and we used music that would motivate us to enter the world we wanted to be in, and his music did that. And when it came to getting the rights for the music, we ran it past him and he let us use it. And it was him and the New Zealand composer Rodi Kirkcaldy, his German composing partner Florian [Zwietnig], they did the rest of the music. So it was just a really good fusion, and I’m really proud of what those guys did as well. I’m so proud of our music. There are so many things you need to get right in a film, and I think they really nailed the music.
Capone: There are moments that seem wonderfully composed, as well as the expected hand-held camera with the secret filming. Were there certain other docs you were looking at?
DF: Yeah, we talked a lot about that, because part of this project is we wanted it to look good on the big screen. So Dominic Fryer was our DP. We really respected the work he’s done before. This was his first feature, but we really knew he could step up and own it. I know Dom took a lot of inspiration from THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL, because obviously Wes Anderson has an amazing eye, but very specifically the way the shots in particular are composed—a lot of things are symmetrical, and there’s just a certain look, so I know Dom turned to that.
THE IMPOSTER was a big one too, not just for its amazing storytelling but the way it did certain recreations. Just the idea of the big, wide interview shots where their location is just as important as what the person is saying. So THE IMPOSTER was big, and a little bit just as far as the involvement of me and Dylan in the story itself, BIGGIE AND TUPAC was a big touchstone, just having a journalist be a part of a story, but not to an arrogant or annoying level, just like incorporating yourself into a story in a practical way.
Capone: Now that you’ve shown this to a few film festival audiences and others, what have been the range of responses to this?
DF: The weirdest thing is people who would come up, and there’s that slow-mo tickling sequence, and most people generally seem to feel uneasy watching it, or they don’t quite know what they’re watching. There’s a few people who have come up and said, “I was watching that, and I felt some butterflies in my stomach, and I realized that I love tickling videos.” They had no idea.
Capone: You’ve discovered the fetish for them.
DF: But apart from that, the general feeling that people have is they don't believe it’s real. There are a few people specifically that think it’s all made up—all of it. If you go to our trailer, the American-made trailer, there’s debate raging in the comments about people arguing for reasons, like you said—the cinematography, “It looks too good. It can't be a real documentary.” So, I find that amusing as well.
Capone: I read somewhere that you had a look book for this, which I had never heard of for a documentary before.
DF: Literally, we looked at documentaries we admired and films we admired, and we looked at the way shots were composed and what we liked and we just took screenshots. Dom was in South America at the time when we were very early on with me trying to explain to Dom what the story was, and I said “Obviously, you’re going to start thinking about how you want this thing to look and how we’re going to shoot this thing.”
So it was a lot of screenshots from films that he loved and that I loved and just thinking about how it would look, just documents about how we would shoot interviews, the simple thing of how we would shoot in a car, you know? Were we going to shoot in the backseat? Was it going to be him and a passenger shooting the side of my face? And something that Dom discovered for himself was there’s a lot of shots of mirrors in the car. So if I’m driving, it’s not going to be my face staring at you, but it will be like this very subtle little shot in the rear-vision mirror, and that was playing with the idea of what you see is not necessarily the exact thing you’re looking at.
Capone: You used Kickstarter for this, but if I remember the order of events, you used it initially for the first part of the investigation, and then when it expanded did you have to go back and ask for more?
DF: No. Originally, we wanted Kickstarter to fund the whole film. We thought we were going to make a half-hour video on Vimeo and charge five dollars for it, and we will go to America once, we’ll shoot it all with that money, we’ll come back, we’ll cut it, we’ll put it out. While we’re over there, the story got much bigger. We found out there were a lot more people we needed to talk to and there’s a lot more going on. We didn’t know the scope of the story was as big as it was. So we came back with that Kickstarter-shot footage, and we pitched it to the film commission who are a government body in New Zealand, and they gave us more funding, then we went back to America again.
Capone: There is something about this story that feels uniquely American.
DF: This specific story, I do see very much as being something that almost couldn't happen anywhere but America. It was funny, I’ve talked to a few people this week about it, and they draw parallels with what we’re seeing with Donald Trump ascending and how powerful he can be. He is at your classic American extreme, with his litigiousness and his image, and the rhetoric, and I think there are certain parallels with what you see in TICKLED and what is happening there as well.
Capone: In L.A., why do you think those people showed up?
DF: I don’t know. I’ve been wondering that myself, because it gave us a lot more publicity. It put them out there more. The whole story is about bullying, and I think they appear to turn up to tell us that we’re going to expect more legal action, and I think it’s just more bullying.
Capone: Were you afraid at some point that the release would be shut down or delayed substantially?
DF: Yeah, I was more worried with submitting it to festivals, because we needed to make sure that we were covered in terms of insurance, if anything goes wrong. But once we were in Sundance and that was secured, the rest of the ride has been good. We’ve had lawyers look over it, we know it’s all legit, and we’re okay. Nothing can really stop the film from being released. We were concerned what would happen along the way, whether there would be protests or any kind of disruption at screenings, but there hasn’t been apart from the fact that sometimes people from Jane O’Brien Media will be in the audience.
Capone: I assume at some point you brought in lawyers to look at it during post production, and not just after it was done.
DF: We did. We were very lucky. On Twitter and through some other contacts, we reached out and had a very kind and very smart defamation lawyer in New Zealand and in America give us advice pro bono. And once we got funded, we could actually start paying some attorneys ourselves. But early on, oh yeah, when those letters were coming it’s not like we were just going, “Oh, we’ll just proceed.” We were checking that we were alright.
Capone: I hesitate to ask, but where do you go from here?
DF: I don’t know. This is such a…this story is still ongoing with us, right? So, I feel like this is very active, and we have to cover that.
Capone: There is a second act to this.
DF: I know We are in the middle of the second act at the moment. So I don’t know. I’ve got other documentaries I’d love to work on at some point in my life, but at the moment everything seems to be taken over by this.
Capone: Do you still have the day job?
DF: No. I gave that up as we went into Sundance. I knew this year was going to be pretty crazy with this film, and I wanted to try some other things, so I’ve stepped out of the newsroom for now.
Capone: So by doing that, are you committing to making a go at filmmaking now?
DF: Yeah, completely. It seems like a good time in life to embrace that concept. So we’ll see how it goes.
Capone: Well congratulations. Best of luck. Thanks for you time.
DF: Thanks for being into the film and for watching it.
