The filmmaker with nothing to lose isn’t afraid of being sued
David Farrier is used to getting in over his head. When his 2016 documentary Tickled screened at True/False Festival in Missouri, two private eyes were thrown out, suspected of filming with cameras hidden in Starbucks cups. A trick that Farrier himself has used.
Tickled explores the scams of David D’Amato, who used female aliases to offer money to strapping young men for recording tickle-fetish videos, and then threatened to expose the men if they stopped. Life imitated art when D’Amato showed up at a screening of Tickled and loudly contested the film. At another screening, Farrier and co-director Dylan Reeve were served with a summons for a defamation lawsuit. D’Amato has since died.
New Zealand journalist David Farrier (left) in Netflix series Dark Tourist.
“I’m not a confrontational person at all in my personal life,” Farrier says. “But when there’s a reason for confrontation in my work, that’s my chance to feel safe exploring it.”
New Zealander Farrier spent eight years in a conventional newsroom, but was drawn to subcultures, like one of his inspirations, Louis Theroux. Also like Theroux, Farrier has an amiable demeanour, the kind someone might be foolish enough to underestimate.
“Flight of the Conchords opened up doors to people with a New Zealand accent,” he says of the comedy music duo who landed an HBO sitcom. “We come across as naive. I can walk up to any sort of person and ask pretty stupid questions, and they’re very happy to talk to me.”
After Tickled, and its follow-up about the fallout, The Tickle King, both of which were picked up by HBO, Farrier made Netflix series Dark Tourist, in which he visited macabre sites around the world, and the documentary Mister Organ in 2022.
Farrier’s HBO documentary Tickled was a huge success.
When we speak, Farrier is at home in Los Angeles. He moved there from New Zealand to escape Michael Organ, the subject of Mister Organ. On the surface, Organ is an overzealous parking lot attendant at an Auckland antiques shop, clamping cars. But he’s a man with many faces and court cases, and a man Farrier has called “a black hole”. Filming turned into a lengthy game of cat and mouse, with Organ procuring a key to Farrier’s house, making legal threats and turning up to screenings.
“I wanted to just get away from this place that felt very claustrophobic because at that point he had invaded a lot of different parts of my life,” Farrier says. “It’s my understanding he doesn’t have a passport. Fingers crossed.”
Over the next fortnight, Farrier brings Tickled back to Melbourne and Sydney. The screenings are for his robust online community, after realising many of the newer converts hadn’t seen the film that launched his independent career. He also has a very personal regard for the kind of connections that can begin online. Having attended a private Christian school in small-town Bethlehem, a suburb of Tauranga, he describes his younger self as closed-minded until he discovered online message boards in the late 1990s. “I found a bunch of people with different points of view to me,” he says, “and it opened up a whole world of possibility.”
In recent years, he’s moved on from documentaries, opting for more direct lines to his audience – through his weekly podcast Flightless Bird and his investigative newsletter, Webworm. Whatever the medium, he runs headlong into the worlds of schemers, narcissists and con-artists: people most of us choose to avoid.
Farrier now hosts the weekly podcast Flightless Bird and publishes an investigative newsletter, Webworm.Credit: Suppied.
“I think of my work as a form of therapy. I mean, I spent a year writing about an abusive megachurch in New Zealand, and that was a way of working through my religious upbringing,” he says.
You can find those reports on Webworm, along with stories such as his attendance at a Creed show that felt more like a Trump rally.
“They’d gone through an incredibly open meltdown over the years,” he says of the ’90s post-grunge band he loved as a 14-year-old. “So I thought, ‘Why the hell are they back?’ They were always a closet Christian band, but what’s fascinating is that Creed in 2024 aligns with Christian nationalism. The level of politicisation of that concert was huge: American flags, lots of T-shirts saying, ‘Don’t tread on me’, ‘Don’t take my weapons’.”
There’s also a story on “Fake Seizure Guy”, who has been spotted for years in Melbourne, falling to the ground and shaking. “He says [to men], ‘Can you please sit on me and restrain me?’” Farrier says. “I wanted to get to the bottom of what was going on.”
It’s possible Fake Seizure Guy has seen the giant Spotify billboard on Swanston Street for Farrier’s Flightless Bird, which has the premise of a hapless Kiwi trying to make sense of America. Farrier crisscrosses the country, recording stories on Seventh-day Adventists, Navy dolphins trained to protect American waters and the cult-like appeal of restaurant chain Olive Garden. There’s always a dark twist. A Farrier twist.
When he speaks to The Age, it’s the day before the US election, and he outlines his plan – hanging out at a Trump-watch party for an episode of his podcast.
“I’m going to drive an hour into prime Trump/alt-right Nazi kind of territory, and spend a night there as the results come in,” he says. “It’s not my happy place. I do wear my heart on my sleeve, and probably some of my writing on Webworm veers into activism over straight journalism.”
This partisan approach is another reason he has no intention of returning to mainstream news sites.
“I have enough people subscribing to Webworm that I can pay a really good lawyer,” he says. “A big part of what makes me feel confident is that I don’t have a partner at the moment, I don’t have children. The worst thing that can happen to me is that I will be sued into bankruptcy – and I don’t have a lot so that’s not a big worry.”
The Tickled Q&A is at Sydney’s Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace on November 27 and Melbourne’s Cinema Nova on December 6.
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