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Reality TV has ruined people's ability to watch documentary.
Everything in the film [Tickling], which was vetted by lawyers, is perfectly legal. I'm not losing any sleep over what I did.
When you're doing an investigation of a company that is doing things that they don't want to be found out, and they say, "I don't want to be on tape," you're not suddenly going to step away and say, "Okay, I'm not going to make a film."
It's easy to get young gay men to tickle each other, right? Let's come up with a challenge: Let's get heterosexual men. How do we do that? We make it a competition, because then it's not gay. That explains the antipathy behind the gay-journalist comment.
In New Zealand, we have a one-party disclosure system, where if one of you knows you're being recorded, it's completely fine. It doesn't matter if the other person doesn't know. Look, I'm not breaking new ground by recording people who don't want to be recorded.
You could make a feature about the world of tickling. You could include female ticklers and you could find out why people are ticklish, but I don't think it would be a great documentary, when you're spending 90 minutes just finding out about the physiology and psychology of tickling.
I was tied down in that chair for 10 minutes and experienced what it was like to be completely powerless while someone else has complete dominance. It's sadistic, even though I find Richard to be a really lovely human being. That's what the whole film "Tickled" is about. It's not a film about tickling, but I think tickling offers a really good visual metaphor for the much bigger ideas that we were trying to get at about power and control - by people who have a lot of money - over people without money and who have no power in the relationship.
I think America is a really interesting place. In New Zealand, we don't sue each other really commonly. There's a really specific reason, like someone's arguing over a fence that's been put up that's too high. Sort of practical things. And journalists are rarely sued for things. Whereas in America, you have a culture where that's the first thing you do. There's an ongoing pattern here where if you've got money, you can bully other people into doing what you want them to do. You don't need to be in it to win, you just need to be in it to be a pest.
It's unfortunate we live in a society where "gay" is an insult. To some of these boys, who are from really red states and have families with military history, to be called gay is the worst thing imaginable, and that's used against them. It's really interesting that these are the people drawn into the tickling world. If the people drawn into competitive endurance tickling, even if they were straight, came from liberal, accepting backgrounds, the backlash of calling them gay wouldn't be a problem. But it's a problem because of where these people are from. That's really fascinating to me.