By Travis Johnson
The life of a viral video, even one as explosive as this, is generally quite short. What made you think that his was a good subject for a longer documentary?
I was quite reluctant early on. Lauren [Elliott] and Mark [Conway, producers] and I went to ABC with a different idea and they said, ‘We really like the team, but can you throw a few different ideas at us?’ This came up as a possible idea for the 28-minute documentary, and they kind of jumped on it, because it was about the time that Jon Ronson’s book [So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed] was out. I think they liked the angle.
Initially I was super reluctant because I just felt horrible about the situation and I didn’t know why. I just wasn’t sure I could tell the story properly. The story that was out there in the media was so one sided, it was daunting for me to have to go in there and complicate the issue. But then Mark got into contact with Eddie Martin [director of Lionel and All This Mayhem, who acted as a mentor and executive producer on the film], and I’m a bit of a fanboy of his films. He was pretty excited about the idea, which in turn got me pretty excited about the idea, and I thought, ‘Alright, cool, I’ll take it on and see where it goes.’ And it all kind of progressed from there – I’m happy where we got to in the end.
How do you shape a documentary like that? What direction did you initially intend to go in, and did it match where you ended up?
I didn’t want to overcook it, because I’m obviously in it. It was important to make it natural. As a director you’d typically write something like this beforehand and ask questions after, but because I was the subject it became a huge problem early on. The way around that was to not write anything down or plan it out at all, but to instead set up a time where I can talk to a friend about it. We just put the camera across me explaining the situation and my attitude throughout the whole experience casually with a friend. We captured quite a few hours of that and cut that down to be the bare bones of the documentary, and then filled in the blanks from there.
Digilante exposes the complexities behind what initially seems to be a fairly cut and dry situation as presented in the media. How do you think this reflects the current state of news-gathering, particularly in the digital realm?
I guess it’s all one now, isn’t it? It’s not really the media, it’s us. There are media organisations, but there’s also just Facebook. People get their stories from all over the place, and there’s not really much management of it. The truth gets lost very easily these days.
I reckon you could make one of these docos for every single news story that’s out there. It’s such an oversimplification of what’s going on. To communicate news you’ve got to make it short and you’ve got to make it interesting, and you kind of omit so much detail that all of a sudden the stories take on a different form than reality. They talk about “post truth” and, yeah, if you omit details to make something interesting, of course you’re going to create that kind of environment. I think it’s an insight into all the stories we concern. It’s nice to have 28 minutes instead of two to tell this story.
