Fetishists, Threats, and Film Fests: The Wild Tale Behind the Buzzy New Documentary 'Tickled'
David Farrier specialized in news of the bizarre. As a reporter for New Zealand’s TV3, Farrier once interviewed a man in Florida who had a 9-month sexual relationship with a dolphin. The telejournalist was also fascinated by survivalists he profiled, people who were prepared to “go bush” once the world inevitably melts down.
Then, just over two years ago, Farrier found the subject that would change everything for him. “People kind of try to outdo me with weird stuff they’ve found,” he told us recently over tacos in West Hollywood. A friend sent Farrier a video from the Web of a fully grown man being mercilessly tickled in what was called “competitive endurance tickling.”
As Farrier remembered, “I had never seen anything that strange.” This, from the guy who specialized in strangeness. So he started blogging about the videos, as did Dylan Reeve, a post-production supervisor on New Zealand’s long-running soap Shortland Street. The posts went viral, the pair teamed up, and the documentary Tickled was born.
Related: Fascinating Documentary ‘Tickled’ Exposes Real-Life Tickle Monster
The film — codirected by Farrier and Reeve — tickled the fancies of critics and sold-out crowds when it premiered at January’s Sundance Film Festival in Utah. While on the surface it appears to be a quirky doc from a pair of good-humored Kiwis, Tickled is a twisty piece of investigative filmmaking that unveils an endless string of shadowy figures, intimidation tactics, and shocking revelations from the world of tickling fetishism.
Watch an exclusive clip from ‘Tickled’:
While digging into their subject, Farrier and co-director Reeve found ads luring young, fit men from all over the world to Los Angeles on all-expenses paid trips to engage in competitive endurance tickling videos. Shortly after inquiring about the videos, Farrier received strongly worded messages that were apparently from the company behind them, Jane O'Brien Media, which objected to Farrier being gay. (Farrier says he’s actually bisexual.)
“It started so extreme,” Farrier said. “A couple of weeks in, I get a letter from a lawyer in New York telling me to stop [inquiring about the videos]. And I thought, 'It’s got to ease off.’ And then suddenly they’re sending three people from New York first-class to New Zealand… And it just kept [escalating].”
Farrier quit his job at TV3 as the documentary became all-consuming (“Suddenly I found doing two-minute stories on the news became repetitive and a bit boring,” he said). He and Reeve faced constant legal threats, which only made them more obsessive. They knew there was a bear, and that they were poking that bear, and that they would ultimately need to confront that bear. “There’s a level of intrigue and enjoyment that comes from finding things out,” Farrier said. “When you get push-back, you typically know that there’s something there to uncover. Fun is maybe the wrong word, but it becomes interesting. It’s the curiosity.” They launched a Kickstarter campaign and ended up raising $27,000 to finance the film, which would eventually take them to L.A. and around the U.S. on the tickling trail as they documented the bizarre world of these videos and the people who produced them.
‘Tickled’ codirector David Farrier (Magnolia Pictures)
Tickled premiered at Sundance on Jan. 24. A festival screening featured an uninvited guest: One of the men who’d flown from New York to New Zealand to attempt to talk Farrier and Reeve out of the film. (While the co-director can’t say much about the legal action filed against the movie, Farrier applauds the film’s distributor, Magnolia Pictures, and HBO, which bought television rights, for being “pretty ballsy and really supportive.”) A month-and-a-half later, at the True/False Film Festival in Missouri, two men had to be escorted out of a screening when they were caught attempting to record Tickled with a camera hidden inside a coffee mug. “These two guys looked out of place,” Farrier recalled. “They looked like hardened New Yorkers…. They stood out.”
Farrier has been shocked by the response to the documentary, which has emerged as one of the year’s most talked-about independent films. “When we started it we thought it’d be a half-hour Vimeo docu that we’d upload,” he said. “It’s mind-blowing.”
The filmmaker says that some viewers have found the movie stimulating in a different sense. “A couple people have discovered that they’re turned on by tickling, that they like it and didn’t know it. Most people, their reaction seems to be, 'That was a bit uncomfortable watching those people tickle each other.’ But a couple people have been like, 'I loved it. And I didn’t know this about myself, but now I do.’ So that’s been pretty wild.”
Tickled opens in select theaters Friday. Watch the trailer:
