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Mister Organ
David Farrier spent three years chasing the shadowy figure, Michael Organ. (Photo: Supplied / Treatment: Tina Tiller)

Pop CultureNovember 5, 2022

David Farrier on making a movie that never ends: ‘It sucked … it fucked me’

Mister Organ
David Farrier spent three years chasing the shadowy figure, Michael Organ. (Photo: Supplied / Treatment: Tina Tiller)

He fled New Zealand to get away from the subject of his new film. Ahead of Mister Organ’s release, David Farrier’s worried it’s about to kick off all over again.

David Farrier, the journalist, podcaster, film-maker, TV adventurer, online provocateur and bird fanatic, would like to make it very clear that he did not enjoy making his new movie. “I absolutely wouldn’t do it again,” he admits just moments into a Zoom call from his current residence, a clammy, claustrophobic Los Angeles apartment. “It was just a fucking mission … I desperately wanted to drop it. It was miserable. It just went on and on. It was so fucked up.”

With a cap stuffed over his shaggy hair paired with stubble that’s well past the five-day mark, Farrier gives the impression of a man in desperate need of a warm bath and a long nap. After what he’s been through, it sounds like he deserves one. “It just ended up being this long, awful fucking time,” he sighs, hunching further over his laptop screen. “It sucked … It fucked me. If I had my time again with this, I guarantee you I would not do it.”

Farrier’s known for being a dogged journalist, unflappable in the face of tense subject matter and litigious interview subjects. He showed off those skills in his first film Tickled, when he chased an elusive underworld figure desperately trying to cover his tracks, and in Dark Tourist, the Netflix series that saw Farrier horsing around with Pablo Escobar’s former hired guns and swimming in a radioactive lake. With his Substack newsletter WebWorm, he’s spent much of this year taking on the might of Arise church.

But it sounds like Farrier met his match in Mister Organ. Released in theatres next week, Farrier’s second movie tracks a shadowy figure – one who claims, among many other things, to be a prince around Aotearoa for three years. He also talks to many of his alleged victims in an attempt to understand what makes him tick. Over that time, Farrier loses control of his subject and the tables get turned: his front door key is stolen and copied, some of his possessions go missing, and he’s forced to decamp regularly to Whanganui to chase his subject and front for a tense court case.

As tenacious as he is, even Farrier found himself up against it. In one of Mister Organ’s most wrenching scenes, Farrier can be seen crying, hunched over his bed on the phone to a friend, breaking down while regretting every decision that led to him making this movie. That scene, Farrier confirms, was not faked. “Fuck, no, no,” he says. “I was lost in it, lost in what this was, and it was such a shitty, depressing place to be. There are a lot of those moments that happened over probably the last year of shooting where I just … didn’t see a way through it.”

Mister Organ
David Farrier meets Michael Organ outside the Whanganui District Court. (Photo: Supplied)

Filming only finished when Farrier decided he’d had enough. He blocked his subject from his phone, left New Zealand and fled to Los Angeles in a bid to escape his clutches. Why keep going for so long? “I get really obsessed with stories. I don’t want to let things go. And if I’m curious, I want to see what happens next,” he says. “I find it very motivating when people are cagey, and this started with a lot of cagey-ness.”

Farrier likes to find ghosts. He is, he admits, addicted to the thrill of the chase. “If you poke something and people say, ‘There’s no story’ or just don’t talk to you or hang up the phone, that’s when you know there’s definitely something happening. So, that’s like crack. Like, how can you stay away?”

‘He mea tautoko nā ngā mema atawhai. Supported by our generous members.’
Liam Rātana
— Ātea editor

Mister Organ’s princely protagonist is Michael Organ, a character Farrier first encountered while covering him right here on The Spinoff. Regular readers will remember Farrier’s five widely read dispatches on the Bashford Antiques saga, when hungry Ponsonby diners who parked their cars briefly in front of a local antique store while dashing in to pick up their takeaway food would return to find their car clamped. A bearded, black-clad figure would approach demanding hundreds of dollars in cash before they could leave.

It was during this time, while researching his third Bashford Antiques piece, that Farrier decided there was more to Organ than perhaps met the eye. Once he started digging, interviewing those that had come into his orbit, he couldn’t stop. “It was less about a wacky person [and] more about someone who had a really unique fetish for controlling people,” he says. Where most journalists would have run a mile, Farrier decided he’d found the subject for his next film. He began to pull on threads and chase leads. There were many.

He soon found himself immersed in a world where reality began to blur. The relationship between him and Organ is consistently antagonistic. Angry words are exchanged. Legal letters are filed. Threats and counter-threats build up. “You’d think, ‘I’ll never speak to this person again.’ Next minute, out of curiosity, you ask, ‘Do you want to sit down for a coffee?’ and suddenly it’s happening and you’re back in it,” says Farrier, who gets called a “c***” during their first formal interview together. “You’d never quite know what was what was going to happen day to day.”

Mister Organ
Michael Organ and David Farrier enjoy a coffee and a confrontation on the streets of Whanganui. (Photo: Supplied)

Farrier believes his film, set mostly in the confines of an old bank and the surrounding streets of downtown Whanganui, captures a small part of something much bigger going on in the world. While making Mister Organ, the OG of blurred reality, Donald Trump, was never far from Farrier’s mind. “We’re living in a time when … a really good technique to get ahead in life is just to lie and to keep lying and sort of live within your own reality,” says Farrier. “It works really well. You can become president of the United States if you just lie and stick with it.”



Farrier didn’t realise just how far his own wormhole went until he was in too deep. To explain more would give away too much about his twisted film that needs to be seen to be believed. But the film-maker expects most viewers to connect to Mister Organ because they’ve probably had encounters with someone just like his subject. “There are Mister Organs everywhere,” says Farrier. So far, the reaction he’s had to his film seems to confirm this. “That makes me feel slightly better about it. We all brush up against [these kinds of] people. And then we hopefully get the fuck away.”

But Farrier can’t escape. As he returns to Aotearoa to continue promoting his film and front a series of in-person Q&As, he’s worried his subject may want revenge. Has Organ seen his film yet? Farrier doesn’t think so. He hasn’t shown it to him. “He can buy a ticket if he wants to come,” he says.

Is he worried something could spark him off again, or another court threat might be issued, forcing Farrier to return to the world of Michael Organ that he’s only just escaped from? “He’s certainly made his presence known,” says Farrier. “He’s always a bit ahead of where we think he’s going to be. So I’m curious what he’s going to do.” By this, Farrier might be referencing his recent clash with The Platform’s Sean Plunket, who appeared to be taking Organ’s side with a flurry of Twitter posts.

One thing’s for sure: Farrier’s never doing this again. “I’ve got no intent to go and spend time with with another unpleasant person anytime soon,” he says. In fact, he might even be done with documentaries for good. “The whole process was fucked and I hated it. I’m very happy not thinking about making a documentary about anyone at this point.”

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Dua Lipa performs in Auckland (Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)
Dua Lipa performs in Auckland (Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)

Pop CultureNovember 4, 2022

Dua Lipa live in Auckland and the power of arena-sized pop

Dua Lipa performs in Auckland (Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)
Dua Lipa performs in Auckland (Photo by Phil Walter/Getty Images)

Duncan Greive and Stewart Sowman-Lund attended Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia tour in Auckland this week. Both came away with a profound sense of joy.

Pop music’s back in town, baby! After two-and-a-half years of the pandemic, one of the biggest and most anticipated pop acts of the year arrived in Auckland this week: Dua Lipa. Touring her multi-Grammy nominated album Future Nostalgia, which was released in the very earliest days of the Covid-19 outbreak, the two sold out Spark Arena gigs have been a long time coming for fans. And they were worth the wait.

The Spinoff publisher Duncan Greive and live updates editor Stewart Sowman-Lund, both pop music obsessives despite their serious job titles, exchanged a series of frantic emails in an effort to hold onto the happiness they experienced at the concerts this week.

The build up

DUNCAN: This was my first big capital P Pop show since the lowercase p pandemic, and I had honestly forgotten what a beautiful candy floss rush it is just walking to Spark Arena with that electric energy – all these kids dressed up and out of their skin with excitement. It was maybe 80% wāhine, and def teen heavy – but there were also cute little pockets of couples my age and over, on their own, so you really felt like there was this community of pop obsessives here to commune with someone who has become among the best in the world at this specific thing right now.

I was gutted to miss most of Tkay Maidza, but the glimpse I got had beautiful, ebullient energy which got the room going. And I loved the thought which had gone into the pre-show music – Stardust and Jamiroquai and whole bunch of 90s/00s dance music which really spoke to Dua Lipa as a very English artist.

The princess of pop?

STEWART: People throw around monikers like that a lot these days (arguably too much) and I’d heard it referenced a few times in relation to Dua Lipa. Honestly though, it sort of feels right? It could just be a symptom of her 2020 album Future Nostalgia wearing its pop queen influences very much on its sleeve – Kylie, Madonna, a touch of Gaga – but after seeing Lipa perform the album almost in its entirety, it really feels like she’s earned that title. She might not be as well rounded as some of her obvious idols (famously, her dancing has earned some TikTok infamy), but the vocals, costumes, production value and… just general vibe in a packed Spark Arena made it obvious we’re dealing with some real pop royalty.

There’s something infectious about seeing big-scale, campy pop. My last gig at Spark was Billie Eilish – incredible, too. But while Eilish opted to make her show feel intimate and her audience feel closer, Lipa went full noise and I absolutely loved it.

It was a show about dancing

DUNCAN: It does always feel to me that at any given time there is one person who owns that space (even though I find “princess of pop” a spew phrase), and while Taylor and Beyonce and Billie are all different varieties of bigger, there’s something about synthetic pop music in which every song is a different giant arena-sized hook, and Dua Lipa is the best we have at that, for me, right now. I thought her dancing was legit, and really admire someone who responds to criticism by leaning into that and working their ass off.

I loved that she not only had a shitload of dancers with her, always changing and elevating the show, but that she credited them all on the big screen at the start. It was a nice acknowledgement that these productions require dozens of people at the absolute top of their art to gleam like this. Future Nostalgia felt like it drew on so many threads of 80s-00s dance subcultures, and the show did a great job of drawing on everything from electro to new romantics to turn-of-the-millennium house.

Dua Lipa and her dancers in Auckland (Photo: Phil Walter/Getty Images)

And she had vocals for days

STEWART: Totally agree on the dancing. One of my friends thought moments of the show were a bit “cringe” but I was fully drawn into the almost club-like atmosphere that was created by seeing a stage full of dancers performing very limb-heavy choreo. There was even a dance circle at one point that could have collapsed into corny but I thought felt joyful and authentic. It sort of felt like… I was part of it?

Beyond dancing, I was in awe of Dua Lipa’s vocals. I had no prior knowledge as to whether or not she could actually sing or had benefited from the heavy production on her albums. Turns out, she can more than just sing. She managed to elevate many of her biggest numbers so that they successfully sounded different to the studio versions, but not in a tacky remix-heavy way. Her voice just sounded polished, especially considering she was flinging herself around the stage at the same time. I can barely make a phone call while walking let alone sing.

It felt like a salve to the pandemic in the most pure way

DUNCAN: I so agree on her vocals – to sing with that combination of poise and energy throughout, while participating in allllll that choreography – was a lot. I also loved how the crowd met her at that, with a cathartic scream-sing for the ages to all those hits – not just her new songs, but that surprisingly deep catalogue like ‘Be the One’, which killed. I took two of my daughters, including my eight-year-old who absolutely belted the whole thing out at her first pop show. (Mystifyingly, some prudes at the Herald have decided it was not appropriate for kids which is absolutely wild to me – the lyrics are coy by contemporary standards and I feel like at this point it’s clear that we literally all have bums??)

It was also very much an end-of-the-pandemic feeling. Future Nostalgia came out two days into the first level four lockdown in March of 2020. I got the LP and it’s one of the few joyous memories of that time, dancing to it with our kids and taking a little break from the horror. To be here, in that big sold out room, remembering one of the most pure and quasi-religious sensations felt so special. I’ve seen so many all time pop shows here – from Gwen Stefani to The Weeknd to Katy Perry to Justin Timberlake to Kanye to Taylor. I didn’t think Dua Lipa would ever belong in that category. I think it’s pretty undeniable now that she does.

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Anna Rawhiti-Connell
— Senior writer

And so many bangers!

STEWART: You’re absolutely right, Dunc. And what it all came down to for me was that setlist. How does somebody with just two full albums have the right to have produced that many bangers? With the exception of one collab I didn’t really know, the entire 90-minute concert was wall-to-wall hits, hooks and harmonies. I made the unwise decision to buy a seated ticket but after 20 seconds of the first tune – the catchy as anything Physical – I realised this was very much a standing gig. And I wasn’t alone – I only saw a handful of sitters in the stalls, and they very much appeared to be parents and/or guardians.

To once again contrast my experience at the Future Nostalgia tour with my trip to Billie Eilish, that was a gig I could happily sit down for – but at Dua Lipa, all I wanted to do was (badly) dance, (badly) sing and have the time of my life.

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