FARRIER’S FLIGHT
David Farrier has reported from radioactive wastelands and conspiracy rabbit holes, but his latest documentary Mister Organ may have taken him to the most toxic place yet. He tells Steve Newall why he moved countries because of it, but still won’t quit.
DAVID Farrier’s new film Mister Organ has the unlikeliest of origins: a spate of overzealous car clamping outside a Ponsonby, Auckland, antiques shop in the evenings of 2016.
The resulting doco is the story of not just a clamper, but a sex shop owner, convicted yacht thief, serial litigant and self-proclaimed ‘‘prince’’ – a man named Michael Organ. Increasingly, Mister Organ also becomes the story of Farrier’s relationship with him.
Farrier tries to figure out what makes Organ tick, separating fact from fiction as he follows Organ from Auckland to Whanganui.
Organ seems to relish Farrier’s attention, and that of his camera, even as he feigns resentment. While clamped carowners may have coughed up exorbitant amounts for their transgressions, Farrier learns the hard way that spending time with Organ means you pay something worse: a soul tax.
‘‘This was years and years that I spent thinking about this person and them f… ing with me,’’ says Farrier.
Uncovering a trail of victims left in Organ’s wake, chilling accounts of intimidation and violence pepper the film, a decades-long pattern of exploiting the vulnerable. Farrier’s sense of obligation to the people sharing traumatic stories made him persevere, even when he found himself the target of Organ’s ire and finishing the film felt increasingly impossible.
When we chat, Farrier is on his computer in a quaint one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, US.
It’s no coincidence that this is also a long way away from Michael Organ.
Farrier has been based in LA since 2021 when the New Zealand border closed during the pandemic. The chance to work on a new documentary in the US provided a professional opportunity to go there, but as he admits, the driving force was to get away from his prior leading man. ‘‘I was f…ed in the head from Michael’’, he admits.
He’d relocated knowing full well that there were border restrictions, but really ‘‘just needed to get out and away from Mike’’.
Perhaps most associated with quirky, weird stories, Farrier’s done a lot of investigating and interrogating of power, unfairness and manipulation. Or, as Farrier puts it, careful not to minimise the impact: bullies. He’s drawn to people he sees bullying other people. Now, a bully was part of the reason he was stuck Stateside.
‘‘Bullying’s a bit of a simple, allencompassing word for it,’’ Farrier says. ‘‘But I think that’s what it kind of boils down to. With Mister Organ, it was someone that was using certain techniques to control and manipulate other people.’’
As the four years of film-making went by, that became directed at Farrier, eroding his original sense of invincibility.
All that bullying is a far cry from Farrier’s youth, which he describes as a wonderful childhood with very loving parents, surrounded by every kind of animal imaginable (his dad was a vet). ‘‘We had ducks in the bath,’’ Farrier recalls. ‘‘I had a pet goat that would go to school with me in Whangā rei… I got this love of animals and caring for things.’’
Moving from Northland to
Bethlehem, where he attended
Bethlehem College, Farrier has warm recollections of growing up in a
Christian environment. ‘‘I think Christianity instilled some great values in me,’’ he says, but emerging from religion and its linear way of seeing the world proved important for him.
It was going to university that let Farrier shake some of his conservative perspective, and he felt his world continue to expand when he traded med school for an AUT communication studies degree and then a part-time role at TV3.
Having set the bar perhaps impossibly high with his first interview, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (one of Farrier’s faves), he became a fixture on TV3’s Nightline as an entertainment reporter. ‘‘I was like a kid in a candy store,’’ he says. ‘‘I could just dive into subcultures. And it was my job!’’
Veteran newsman John Campbell says he noticed Farrier right from the outset at TV3, as Farrier swiftly progressed from curious autocue operator to full-time reporter. ‘‘His audacity is brilliant,’’ says Campbell. ‘‘Even when he was 23 or so, someone big would be coming to town and he’d say ‘I’m going to get that story. Why can’t I do that story?’ And he’d get it. It’s a fantastic quality.’’
Early on at TV3, Farrier was still figuring out how to tell stories. He’d be meeting Justin Bieber or some strange band from Hamilton that he loved, but had a camera operator that refused to shoot him in any of the shots. ‘‘He said, ‘David, this f…ing story isn’t about you,’’’ Farrier recalls.
For a year or two that notion stuck, but then Farrier thought to himself ‘‘this is stupid’’. Sitting down for interviews with increasingly outrageous people, he couldn’t understand why he was taking the conversation out of the conversation – and so began Farrier’s entertaining explorations of the format’s possibilities.
Free rein at Nightline let him play fast and loose with media conventions, and then Farrier’s late night news exploits reached their arguable apex. His nowinfamous Sauna Sessions interview with Conservative Party leader Colin Craig for TV3’s Newsworthy was magnificent for viewers, disastrous for Craig.
Some credited the sweat-drenched affair with Craig’s ousting from the party leadership (though we soon also learned of Craig’s harassment of former press secretary Rachel MacGregor).
Quite what the critical camera operator would have thought of the Sauna Sessions is anybody’s guess. Let alone Farrier’s films, in which he often takes a central role: ‘‘He’d throw them into the ocean,’’ Farrier speculates. ‘‘He’d set fire to them, he’d scream at me.’’
Aglobal audience joined Farrier as he tumbled down a rabbit hole onscreen investigating ‘‘competitive endurance tickling’’ in 2016’s Tickled. Opportunities beckoned, and Farrier found himself travelling to some of the world’s most ridiculously dangerous destinations as the presenter of Netflix’s Dark Tourist. Encouraged by New Zealand-born Hamish McKenzie to join his fast-growing subscription newsletter platform Substack, Farrier launched Webworm and now has a healthy readership split evenly between New Zealand and further afield. It means he can pay the rent in LA (‘‘it’s a very expensive place to live, like Auckland’’), and writes a lot, publishing three pieces a week. The subscription income also covers legal fees when someone sends him a cease and
desist. ‘‘I love the format of it because it flips the paywall scenario,’’ says Farrier. ‘‘The stuff I think is worthy, for instance the Arise [Church] reporting or what I’m writing about conspiracy theory culture, that’s all free’’.
What is behind the paywall, for those that choose to support Farrier’s work financially, is what he calls less worthy stuff about himself. ‘‘It’s personal essays, you know, it’s about my face blindness.’’
But it wasn’t face blindness that made headlines around New Zealand this year. As Mister Organ neared completion, Farrier was revealing abuses of power by Arise megachurch’s leadership, and implicating lead pastor John Cameron.
‘‘The stuff in Arise was horrific,’’ says Farrier of the widespread mistreatment of interns and staff, sexual assault allegations, and homophobia shared in a series of increasingly furious Webworm stories.
‘‘It was just men being manipulative pieces of s .... And getting away with it for years and everyone just accepting it and just thinking it was OK and being absolutely under their brainwashed power.’’
Webworm’s revelations culminated in the resignations of lead pastors
John and Gillian Cameron, as well as John’s brother Brent. Farrier also eventually leaked the long-delayed and damning independent Pathfinding review grudgingly commissioned by Arise.
But not before he called out other New Zealand news media. To Farrier, their choice not to credit Webworm in their own reporting for exposing Arise wasn’t just territorial but at times fundamentally dishonest.
‘‘They’re
actually not telling the story because the story, according to the six o’clock news, is that for some magical reason, this church is going to look into its conduct,’’ Farrier explains. Arise was desperately trying to avoid any examination of their own conduct. ‘‘They only did it after a f… tonne of hounding.’’
Farrier also found himself reporting on discriminatory, homophobic policies at Bethlehem College, where he’d been head boy. Farrier wrote of the disgust he was taught to feel about anyone that didn’t fit the mould of being straight, even as he was questioning his own sexuality.
Elsewhere on Webworm he would explain why he can get so worked up writing about megachurches: ‘‘I see some of myself in those leaders saying terrible things, because I once thought those terrible things as well.’’
Farrier can also be heard on two regular podcasts on US actor-comedian Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast network. It was Shepard that stepped in when Farrier was in visa limbo and asked him to pitch a show to help him stay. ‘‘Why don’t you just come and work with me?’’ Farrier recalls him saying. ‘‘I’ll get you a visa, I’ll sponsor you and just stay.’’
Farrier stayed, and that podcast, Flightless Bird, is now 20 episodes in. Each week Farrier learns about the US one topic at a time (tipping, baseball, game shows, juggalos). Once a month he also joins Shepard and Monica Padman on their Armchaired and Dangerous podcast to talk conspiracy theories.
To Farrier, geography no longer feels so important. ‘‘I don’t feel like I live here,’’ he says. ‘‘I don’t feel like I live in New Zealand. I don’t really think in that way. I will just be wherever is convenient, and works best at the time.’’
Soon that will see him back home for the cinema release of Mister Organ after impressing audiences in the US – notably actor Stephen Fry, who tweeted ‘‘I’ve just emerged blinking and trembling... and couldn’t recommend a film more highly’’.
Farrier’s also excited to be staging Webworm’s first live (now sold-out) event, Webworm, Arise!. Held at Auckland church St Matthew-in-theCity on November 3, it will see Minister of Justice Kiri Allan chair a panel discussion on the problem with megachurch culture and looking to Christianity’s future.
Mister Organ is in cinemas nationwide November 10.