Tickled interview: The 'competitive tickling' doc that led David Farrier into the heart of America's darkness

We spoke to the co-director behind one of this year's most sensational documentaries - and the bizarre story uncovered within

The next Serial. The next Jinx. The next Catfish.

Tickled will inevitably dance around each of these monikers in an effort to fit comfortably within the hype machine. Really, though, it's all just shorthand for one simple fact: this is one of the year's most unmissable documentaries. One that compulsively sparks discussion, one that lives for word of mouth notoreity. One that must truly be seen to be believed.

David Farrier, New Zealand's leading entertainment reporter, has built a career on the search for life's small eccentricities. When a friend linked him to a video of something called "competitive endurance tickling" - young men strapped down and tickled into oblivion by other young men - it seemed destined as a passing quirk; another of the countless bizarre things we encounter on the internet, take a few moments of glee from, and then move on with our lives.

Having contacted the video's creator, Jane O'Brien Media, for a brief interview on the subject of endurance tickling, Farrier could never have expected the reply he'd receive; a rampage of homophobic slurs against the openly gay journalist, soon descending into legal threats. Something Farrier didn't fail to see the irony of considering, "the sport did seem slightly... gay."

In the pursuit of momentary whimsy, Farrier had unwittingly opened a can of worms that would soon lead him straight into the heart of America's darkness. Indeed, what's so astonishingly gripping about a documentary superficially premised on an underground tickling scene is exactly what's found hiding in the shadows.

Specifically, one mysterious figure who soon becomes emblematic of all the greed and manipulation that's so corrupted the heart of America, and a bracingly honest look at the flawed legal system that's already become such a focus of recent documentary endeavours.

I had the chance to speak to Farrier, who co-directed the film with Dylan Reeve; both on the more superficial complexities of the art of tickling, and the darker implications of what Tickled comes to uncover.

Sorry to start with this but, just while waiting for this interview, I started suddenly obsessing over whether you could die from tickling. Do you know?

It’s funny, I thought about this at some point as well. You would eventually, because… just, the exertion. I was tickled by Richard Ivey, the good tickler in the film [and owner of a tickling fetish website]; I was strapped down in his tickling chair and tickled for ten minutes, because part of his deal in giving me an interview was that he would do that to me. But it’s f*cking awful and, like, it’s so intense and I was aching for days afterwards, just because every muscle in your body contorts and tightens. And so, yeah, I imagine if it happened for long enough; probably your heart would give out, or physically you’d be exhausted. Saying that, though, you’d probably faint and then your body would be relaxed. So, maybe you couldn’t die from tickling?

I just struggle with what exactly the biological purpose of ticklishness is. It’s such a strange thing.

There was a moment when we were making the film where we wondered whether we’d go into the science of tickling and what makes you ticklish; but I think pretty early on Dylan [Reeve, co-director] and I, and our whole team, kind of decided that wasn’t the angle. It’s not even really a film about tickling in the end; it’s about this company and the lengths they go to do what they do. Tickling in itself, you can’t tickle yourself; it’s impossible. It can only be done if you don’t know where the touch is going to come from. It’s a really fascinating thing.

As you said, it balloons into something that’s completely beyond tickling itself. Really, at what point did you realise – this is special - this had to be a documentary?

It happened fairly quickly, but it was a real evolution. My friend sent me a link to this website saying, “David, you do crazy stories. Check this out.” So I thought, this is a TV story. I’ll interview Jane O’Brien over Skype, I’ll interview a New Zealand competitor, and it’ll be this two-minute story for our news show in New Zealand. They really quickly did that response where they were, like, “we don’t want to deal with a homosexual journalist. Go away.” So I started blogging about it. I was blogging about the e-mails back and forth; what I could find out about the company. Dylan started blogging separately on his website.

Then, about a week into that, I invited Dylan round to my place for pizza and I was like, “we should do a Kickstarter, so we can maybe fund a trip to go to America and to look further into it, and maybe make a little documentary. Like, something for Vimeo or YouTube or something.” Within a month of finding the topic, we were funded and we went to America to shoot it. It happened so quickly.

Then the story became bigger; so we came back to New Zealand and we applied for funding from the New Zealand Film Commission. We got some more money and we went back again. So to that Kickstarter meeting, where I knew we could make some kind of documentary was, maybe, two or three weeks in?

Everything happened so quickly. We were debating when we would start filming, because everything was taking place over e-mails and it was, like, legal threats turning up. It’s not the most riveting documentary, you know, filming documents. Then Jane O’Brien was, like, we’re going to send three representatives from New York to New Zealand to talk with you. And it was like, OK, this is where we start filming.

I can’t imagine you expected anything close to what actually went down, right?

We had no idea where it was going to go, and the scale of where it was going to go. We had suspicions of certain things, but it was all very up in the air. We didn’t know who was who; we didn’t know who was real, who wasn’t real. And by the time we ended up in Muskegon, talking to MMA fighters about tickling, we were like – what is going on?

It’s crazy.

You couldn’t make this stuff up. Some people think it’s so unbelievable that they’re convinced we had made a mockumentary, essentially. All the controversy around it – people turning up to screenings and heckling us - they think we’ve hired actors to turn up to screenings. People can’t believe it. But real life is always stranger than anything you could think up. And it’s just a case of that. It’s, like, right place, right time, right people. All the people involved that I knew, that came on board to help me; everything was just perfect. Dylan and I didn’t even know each other before this; we were Twitter friends.

This type of documentary always makes me wonder - how common are these kinds of stories and experiences in the world?

I marvel at the number of things like this, especially on the internet. You see something a bit weird but you just don’t click on it, you kind of get distracted. If you did click that thing, or you did do that thing, you could probably do a deep dive and find similar crazy worlds that exist. Except that you’re a busy person and you don’t always do that. It just happens that I e-mailed this company and posted on their Facebook wall and was slightly persistent; and they instantly bit back and it just snowballed. And so, I think there’s things like this everywhere beneath the surface, but we just don’t know.

Coming from New Zealand, and into America, adds this sort of interesting 'David vs. Goliath' narrative to the film. Was that something you were conscious of at the time?

It was a bit of a fish out of water thing. I think that helped the film because we went about things with a very wide-eyed fascination at everything, and it was also quite a low-key kind of approach. We weren’t ever setting out to be bullies ourselves, and sort of barge in; we kept very calm, which I think is just what New Zealanders are kind of like.

But early on, it was off-putting at times, because we saw the money that they had. They had money to fly these three guys - I think they flew Premium Economy or Business or something – they had good seats. And they stayed at the Hilton, this waterfront hotel. So they clearly had money. They clearly didn’t want us doing the story.

We were told very early on that there wouldn’t be a moment when we were in the United States where we wouldn’t be tailed by a private investigator. And I’d already had a private investigator outside of my house in New Zealand that had been hired by these people. So, it was all very real and for me - I found that quite scary early on.

It ends up becoming this grand sort of metaphor for America itself, really.

It is that ultimate version of America and what it’s obsessed with. You know, with Donald Trump potentially being President; he’s a guy who proudly sues people. This film ends up being about money and power and control, based around a lot of manipulation. And I think it’s similar to a lot of things we see in the United States, because a lot of the people drawn into the tickling world are just by their natures and why they’re drawn in – they don’t have a lot of money. The people who go to these tickling contests are poor, often. So instantly there’s this power play at work, where they’re working for this company that has a lot of money, they’ve got no money, so instantly the power play is kind of f*cked up.

And, yet, there's a lot of humour in Tickled. It's a constant flip between terror and humour.

It’s an uneasy tension, I think. You don’t want to laugh at the stuff, but at times you kind of do laugh at it, and there’s parts of the film that I thought were quite serious, but audiences laugh at it. There’s been a couple of people that got quite angry on Twitter; angry at me because the audience was laughing at a certain thing that wasn’t funny. And I’m, like, I can’t control how people are reacting to this thing.

It is just this really uneasy topic. It’s like when you watch someone being tickled. Some people find it really horrifying, some people find it hilarious. And throughout the whole film, I think there’s that dissonance between things.

It's the same way we deal with things like Trump, I guess. I'm laughing one second, and then I'm completely terrified the next.

Totally, you can either choose to laugh at Trump or you can just be really depressed about the world. And also, you just kind of have to laugh at times. If you don’t laugh, you cry; it’s that old thing. We had a lot of laughs on the road making the film, because if you don’t do that you’ll get too wound up and end up crying in a corner somewhere.

With the likes of Serial and Making a Murderer, there's this sudden surge of documentaries having real world impacts on the legal system. Do you see the same thing happening here?

It’s interesting you say that, because part of the intent of making the film was to expose what was going on, and hopefully some change would come from it. I don’t know of any ongoing investigations happening at the moment; but I think when people walk out of the theatre, people do feel an unease that justice hasn’t been done, and it’s my hope that that kind of reaction from people will lead to some kind of a change.

There are things we expose in the film – no one’s been murdered - but there are definitely things going on that aren’t right and are definitely in some very legally murky territory. So it’s my hope that something will eventually happen. But at the very least, if someone’s thinking about doing a competitive endurance tickling competition, they’ll at least Google that and find out about the other side to it. That’s my hope.

Tickled is out in UK cinemas now.