Tickled's David Farrier is moving to the US to make documentaries - maybe

Former broadcaster and film maker David Farrier is preparing to move to Los Angeles.
LAWRENCE SMITH
Former broadcaster and film maker David Farrier is preparing to move to Los Angeles.

"I honestly don't have a masterplan," says David Farrier, who is moving to the US for an indeterminate amount of time next month, and hasn't yet worked out where to store his stuff.

"I've never had a plan ever. I just follow what happens."

It doesn't worry him, and why would it. "It's worked out," he says. "I'm 33, and I've had a pretty fun time so far not planning everything."

Vendetta Films
The trailer for David Farrier's documentary "Tickled".

He cites a former interviewee, Karl Pilkington - part of an eclectic roll call of those he's talked to as a TV3 arts reporter which includes Leonardo Di Caprio, Gene Simmons and Colin Craig (inside a sauna). Pilkington, the idiot savant sidekick of comedian Ricky Gervais, said: "You don't get anything done by planning".

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Farrier filming Tickled in LA.
supplied
Farrier filming Tickled in LA.

 

"I love that concept," says Farrier. "Don't spend your whole life planning. Just do some things. It's really dangerous advice... but honestly, just do stuff."

It's a non-plan that has turned David Farrier, jobbing TV reporter, into David Farrier, acclaimed documentary film-maker. The move to America will take him to a friend's spare bedroom in the hills near Studio City, Los Angeles, with squirrels in the backyard, where he will write and pitch whatever comes to mind: "What we're all doing eh, just hustling". He may have something fomenting, but he insists it would jinx it to tell me before it's fully formed.

Doors have begun to open for the new David Farrier. His documentary, Tickled, which opened in New Zealand cinemas last week, has been critically applauded on the American festival circuit and picked up by HBO for domestic broadcast in the States once its theatrical run ends. "People don't give a shit about David Farrier, but if you made something interesting, that's different..." Despite that, he says: "I'm still figuring it out."

This year has been mainly about having fun: showing the film, meeting people, being interviewed about it. "But I can also look forward to the day tickling is not the focal point of my life."

Doors are opening for former TV3 news reporter David Farrier.
LAWRENCE SMITH
Doors are opening for former TV3 news reporter David Farrier.

All this is possible because Farrier isn't particularly interested in money, nor his inability to buy a house in Auckland, has no kids and no immediate plans or desire for any (unless he meets the right person etc, etc,) and is perfectly comfortable in his own company - but has an insatiable drive for the new and interesting. 

Yes, he says, the no-plan thing has meant some failures. He rushed off to Mongolia in 2009 trumpeting a proposed documentary about the fabled Mongolian death worm (he's into cryptozoology, the study of mythic creatures) and came back with rolls of footage of interviews with ancient Mongolians that remain untouched. He fronted a Rhys Darby-devised mockumentary series, Small Poppies, which tanked, although that isn't a regret: Farrier enjoyed it and he says it began to teach him what might be possible in long-form journalism.

Farrier has been with TV3 since graduating from Auckland University, but has come and gone a few times, thanks to the benevolence of the station's former news boss, Mark Jennings. Tickled came along when he was back with TV3 again, reporting a little and fronting the late-night news show Newsworthy. He chanced on to a website which claimed to pay athletic young men flights, hotels and handsome sums to travel to LA to take part in competitive tickling competitions. Intrigued, he asked for an interview: it was perfect fodder for his particular schtick of interviewing people from weird sub-cultures.

"I'm 33, and I've had a pretty fun time so far not planning everything."
LAWRENCE SMITH/FAIRFAX NZ
"I'm 33, and I've had a pretty fun time so far not planning everything."

Farrier admits that if the competitive ticklers had just told him they were too busy to talk, or even batted up a talking head for a two-minute 'well wouldya look at' that type story, he'd have been sated and moved on. Instead, they posted a message on public facebook wall (which had 22,000 likes) saying they wouldn't deal with a homosexual journalist (he's bisexual, incidentally). That piqued his interest. He began digging, and as the ticklers wrote ever-more angry emails and threatened legal action, he began to blog about it. 

That's how he met Dylan Reeve, a post-production editor on Shortland St and internet expert, who also began blogging, first independently, then with Farrier. They decided to make a documentary, and buoyed by responses to their writing, sought crowdfunding support. $27,000 was raised in less than three weeks through Kickstarter for a trip to LA to try and gatecrash a tickling competition: among their backers were the right-wing blogger David Farrar (who has made great play in the past of being confused with Farrier) and Stephen Fry, who lent his name to the credits as an associate producer.  It was that trip, and the evidence that here was a ready audience, reckons Farrier, that persuaded the New Zealand Film Commission to give substantial support to get the film made.

The film starts with a montage of Farrier's previous offbeat interviews and lots of shots of him tapping away at a keyboard in Mediaworks' Flower St newsroom. "The idea," he says, "is to ease people in: start really light, and then take a turn pretty quickly and I think people seem to be enjoying that surprise when it gets a bit darker." He pauses. "What a world we live in, eh, when this can happen?"

Maarten Holl / Stuff.co.nz
Film reviewer Graeme Tuckett reviews David Farrier's documentary Tickled.

What ensues, I tell him, is not the film I had expected to see. "Ideal," he says. Actually, he'd love it if the audience didn't watch the trailer, read this interview or study the reviews and just turned up to see the movie hoping it was good. I think it will change people's perspective of Farrier: there's genuine investigative work here including some proper doorstep journalism, moments at which Farrier admits "I was shitting myself, big time".

The result has been lots of lawyer's letters. The only question Farrier won't answer is what he thinks of David D'Amato, the shadowy figure who becomes the subject of the film. Legally, it's not safe for him to do so, he says. D'Amato is rich and litigious. Farrier has been served court papers by his people twice, once in Missouri at a film night, once at the Sundance Film Festival. Farrier says he now has a US attorney and the film has insurance against being sued. "So I am completely confident, but it's still unsettling when someone serves you."

One of D'Amato's offsiders sat at the back of the Sundance screening, storming out at the end - only to be halted by an usher pressing a feedback form on him. "For audiences, it was almost a 4D experience: suddenly they were in a cinema with someone who is on screen and it makes it very tense sitting next to someone when you don't know how they are going to react."

David Farrier with co-director Dylan Reeve.
LAWRENCE SMITH
David Farrier with co-director Dylan Reeve.

Farrier, however, is dearly hoping that all that goes away now. It's the approach he takes in the film - he's studiedly calm and neutral in the face of hysteria. "Anyone I meet, I want them to like me," he explains.

Among the early audience feedback came from his parents, "conservative, but not conservative conservative", who didn't originally like the premise but loved the finish product.

Farrier was born in Whangarei, and home-schooled there by his mother between the ages of eight and 12, before the family moved to the Tauranga suburb of Bethlehem. He was the head boy of the independent Christian Bethlehem College and admits to being  very straight. "I was fully on board," he says. "I wasn't very curious about a lot of things, but I had a great time." 

He doesn't regret this, but when he moved to Auckland to study medical science, with the plan to become a doctor, there was a rapid enlightenment. It was there, he thinks, that he developed an enduring obsession with subcultures, drifted away from the church, and realised he might not be suited to being a doctor, on the twin grounds that he didn't like blood and guts and wasn't maybe as clever as he thought he was.

His parents, he says, completely accepted this, just as they would later accept his bisexuality, and so he began writing music reviews for the student newspaper Craccum, with a view to becoming a journalist. Once he was hired by TV3, he thinks it was the remains of this straitlaced naivete that helped him forge a style that worked. "It leant itself to good storytelling, because I didn't prejudge anything. I was able to meet a porn star, not judge anything and have a very open and frank conversation that turned into a story I was very proud of."

He loved TV3. He ended up as the Auckland arts reporter on Nightline, their slightly-irreverent late-night news; future flatmate Sam Hayes was his Wellington counterpart. He got free trips to LA, met the heavy metal musicians he had idolised. "It was a pretty good ride," he says, "I lucked out."

When Nightline was ditched, he was pretty upset. He ended up freelancing across the network, filing stories that ran on Campbell Live, or the 6pm news, or the Paul Henry show, or sometimes just online. And he got a sense he was about to start repeating himself. "I was just getting exhausted with myself, and other people were probably getting sick of me, so creatively I was feeling a bit aimless."

So Tickled came at the right time. By the time "the craziness happened" at Mediaworks, as a swathe of established current affairs names and shows were purged, Farrier was already at arms length - although he was more than happy to jump into the pile-on that ensued when Mediaworks' unpopular chief executive, Mark Weldon, departed in April this year. 

But by the time he left, the changes at TV3 were already weighing upon his colleagues. ​He found, he says, that film people were all quite upbeat and inspiring, which was a rather different vibe to the newsroom at the time, which was just beginning to experience the crushing turmoil of the Weldon era at Mediaworks.

"I'm not going to rush back to TV3," Farrier says. "I've done too much and got bored. But I am not against going back. I wouldn't go back if Mark Weldon was there, but now he is not I am infinitely more open to going back. But it will be a while." He will miss, when he does, the friends from those days: Jennings and his other acknowledged mentor, John Campbell, among them.

There's been a lot of change in his life of late. Part of the US move means moving out of the Herne Bay flat he's shared with Hayes for the past few years - the existence of which became a strangely newsworthy thing and their big marketing tool for their co-hosted show Newsworthy. She was, he says, the model flatmate and even put up with his parrot, Keith. Keith is also no longer with Farrier. It's a sad tale, involving Keith's increasing jealous aggression towards visitors and Farrier's realisation he couldn't devote enough time to his old friend. Keith now lives in an aviary in Kerikeri, not too distant from Farrier's parents, who have moved back to Whangarei in their retirement. "I miss that little bugger." 

Farrier accepts that his particular style of journalism has turned him into a public figure, of sorts, and that there's quite a few people out there who loathe him, or at least what they've seen of him on the telly. None of this bothers him. He's also aware that his sexuality will again be talked about as Tickled gets attention and he has accepted that, and that most audiences - given the initial response from the ticklers - will assume he's gay. For a while, Farrier's sexuality and a former relationship with Grayson Coutts - son of sailor Russell - was news. He says that was natural curiosity but he rebuffed approaches to lend his name to campaigns for marriage equality. "I'm quite private, even if I am all over twitter a hundred times a day."

But this public property aspect has taken one intriguing turn of late. In one segment of Tickled, he meets a very convivial tickling fetishist called Richard. The price of getting an interview was a ten-minute session where Richard could tie Farrier up and tickle him mercilessly, without a safe word. It was, says Farrier, "absolute hell". Right now, he says, he's enduring strangers lurching up to him on the street and starting to tickle him. Yes, he says, he's very ticklish indeed. But hey ho, at least it means they've seen the movie. 

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