SXSW 2022 Interview: Casey Neistat and Christine Vachon on Creating a Full Picture of Internet Fame in “Under the Influence”

“Of any YouTuber, I’ve never seen anyone as loved as you were,” Casey Neistat tells David Dobrik at the start of “Under the Influence” as someone who would know, accumulating over three billion views on his own YouTube channel though with his band of merry mischief makers the Vlog Squad, Dobrik has over double. The operative word in that sentence, however, is “were” when Dobrik’s popularity was put in the past tense by a damning report from Business Insider writer Kat Tenbarge about one of Dobrik’s associates Durte Dom, who convened a sex party attended by Dobrik where a woman claimed she was raped after becoming too inebriated to give consent. Remarkably, much of the evening was filmed and posted to YouTube, as nearly every aspect of Dobrik’s life had been since 2015, yet both cultural attitudes that had changed since the #metoo movement and the woman’s decision to come forward to report the sexual assault allegations would reshape the conversation around the video, which had been taken down relatively quickly after it had been posted and lost in the vast attention economy of the Internet.

“Under the Influence” began with Neistat telling a personal story through Dobrik’s journey, simply filming videos with his friends that caught on before he could buy a $6 million home with all the sponsors eager to have him build their brands online as an influencer. But as he’s been apt to do as an online filmmaking pioneer, Neistat ends up creating something far larger than himself with his gripping first feature, recognizing that the same lack of infrastructure that gave rise to Dobrik also left him without anyone to say no to him and the Vlog Squad when their actions might cross a line and that while carefully choreographed stunts they do for the benefit of their audience may appear to happen off-the-cuff, what you’re seeing is never the full picture. An all-too-rare nonfiction foray from Killer Films producer Christine Vachon, who’ll occasionally sneak in “The Velvet Underground” and “Dina” amidst dramas such as “Zola” and “First Reformed,” the film can’t be accused of the same, delivering a fascinating view of online culture that’s never seen the big screen before and a compelling character study of someone whose fast fame comes at a considerable price.

As the film made its premiere at SXSW, Neistat and Vachon spoke about reuniting on the project after first working together on the HBO series “The Neistat Brothers,” which charted his exploits with siblings Van and Owen, and how a story that was always going to be difficult to pin down became harder when Tenbarge’s reporting upended the production, yet ultimately yielded something more powerful.

Back in 2014, you gave a keynote address at SXSW that made me think you’d never end up making a traditional feature when you were having so much success creating your own content for YouTube. Was it interesting to finally go through this process?

Casey Neistat: In 2014, when I was finding cadence on YouTube and so much of my platform then was about really evangelizing and self-distributing your work and this movie is the full circle of having run that gambit. Now I’m here presenting a movie that’s about that very subject.

It’s exciting being here. It’s exciting to get to work with people like these guys, and for Christine and I to rekindle a professional relationship that started with the 2008 HBO show that we made together. But the process of making this movie has been daunting. When you start a documentary, you don’t know the end point. Historical documentaries where you have some understanding of what the narrative is [have] one approach, and I’ve done that before and enjoy that, but with this, we didn’t know where the story was going to take us. It’s been a real rollercoaster ride, calling Christine [at times], being like, “I don’t think we have it. I don’t know that this makes sense. I don’t know what’s going to happen, or where we go.” And she’s providing me the confidence to be patient and let the story evolve as life went on.

It’s interesting to see you cross paths at this particular point where Killer Films is increasingly producing across more mediums and Casey’s making his first feature.

Christine Vachon: The tail doesn’t wag the dog. We get interested in documentaries when we feel like we can bring something to the table because the actual art of making a documentary, Casey knows much better than I do. I know how to tell a story, and I know how to provide resources. I could tell that Casey’s instincts were really strong about what he still needed because you would say sometimes like, “I don’t have it, this is a disaster.” But then [Casey] would say, “But this is what I need.” And [his] instinct was almost always correct.

Casey Neistat: And if I had to assign Christine’s greatest singular contribution to this movie beyond the guidance and mentorship that she brought for me, [it’s] what she’s articulating about me not knowing and feeling like it’s a disaster and lacking confidence in the story and ultimately introducing me to Mark Monroe, [who’s] credited as the writer for this movie [which is] such an appropriate title, as weird as that feels for a documentary, with the documentary we have hundreds of hours of footage. A story can manifest in infinite amounts of ways and Mark was there in the trenches with me, helping me really stay focused in both my approach to everything from interviews to the edit, to post-production that gave the kind of cohesion that ultimately led to the confidence that we had a real story.

Christine Vachon: I remember Mark calling me after he met with Casey and saw the footage, and he was just like, “This is going to be amazing.” And not that I didn’t already know that, but he had such an experienced eye as somebody who had been working in documentary for so long that I was just like, “Okay, it’s going to go where Casey wants it to go.”

Did you know pretty early you could tell a pretty sprawling story about the Internet through David or did it grow out of following him?

Casey Neistat: Yeah, when this project began, the ambition was always to share an inside perspective of what it meant to be a truly prominent influencer in the year 2019 when we began. I had an extraordinary experience as a YouTuber and as an influencer and I left that space with such a clear understanding of what it was, realizing that understanding is so specific and so nuanced and so brave for everyone else from the outside looking in, I thought an insider perspective would be tremendous.

I started with David, but absolutely did not know if it would begin or end with him. Featuring other creators was certainly an idea that we entertained, but as the complexities in David’s own life and career started to reveal themselves, it was abundantly evident that focusing on him as a case study was really the best way to illustrate the pros and cons of what happens when there’s no distance between the creator and the audience.

One of the things I love about the film is an insight I feel only you could have in creating sequences where you see what made it online versus what happened to create that video. What was it like putting that together?

Casey Neistat: The intent was always to show the reality behind the camera, and a lot of credit is due to our lead editor James Leche. As a creator, every one of my thousand videos on YouTube, I wrote, directed, edited and filmed myself with very few exceptions and I’m used to being in one-man shop and where my relationship with Christine [was important was] the understanding and confidence that came from really appreciating what my needs are to make this something that’s much bigger than what I could just do myself. Obviously, Mark was highly instrumental in that and Mark brought in James, and [for] that specific device, I expressed that I need a way to show this is the video that 20 million people see when they click on YouTube that this young creator David made. How do we show what actually took place in the real world in order for him to craft those four minutes? And it was James that put together that very specific filmmaking device of pulling out of there and then punching straight back to my shot, and when James uncovered that, I called him and I was like, “That’s it. That’s exactly what I want.”

Beyond the Insider story dropping, is there anything that happens along the way that changes your ideas of what this could be?

Casey Neistat: Entirely. My own perspective, because of my experience, felt very obvious to all of us. Our initial conversations I had with Christine and certainly with Mark lean into my understanding. There’s discussion of, should I narrate it? Should I have animation that evokes the tone and aesthetic of my YouTube videos? Like, “Let’s make this my story.” And I’m using characters like David as my case studies. But as the layers of complexities and the depth of David’s story started to peel away one by one, and more importantly, once that Insider article was published, it was abundantly clear that the documentary required a much more serious, reverential tone.

And more importantly, I made a decision, a very vocal decision, that no longer was my perspective as important or as relevant as me, the director, taking a really objective journalistic [approach] on this movie. I don’t want to be speaking for any of the characters in this movie. My job as a filmmaker is to let them speak for themselves and it’s important that in watching this movie, what they’re saying is only based on what they’re communicating themselves, and not what me as a filmmaker thinks about it. That was a really critical pivot point in the post-production and the assembly of this movie.

I imagine the Insider article leads to a lot of reconsideration of what this is and even perhaps some panic. What were you thinking when this took a turn?

Christine Vachon: It felt like it was a catalyst.

Casey Neistat: That’s fair. It’s very clear in my initial interviews with David, in the footage that Christine saw before this was ever a documentary, the videos that he made, the very backbone of his success, were raw and crude, and at best, their appropriateness was borderline. And I don’t think anyone in the movie was naive to that. I don’t think David himself was naive to that. In that initial interview, the first interview Christine ever saw, David talks about all this being [potentially] taken away and he wasn’t speaking in some sort of abstract. He was speaking very literally. I don’t think any of us could have ever seen it manifesting the way that it did. But it was always clear that there was some chance that what this young man did, and what he built this career on might be reevaluated, especially in the world that is 2022, where people are being held to account for past actions. That was not a surprise, but certainly the circumstances were shocking, to say the least.

When you mentioned before there might’ve been a more fun or playful tone, which makes complete sense before this came to light, did it feel like it opened up a more complete tale about this time or that you were capturing something greater than you set out to?

Casey Neistat: It’s hard to say it felt like something greater. One thing that really affected me was just acknowledging and understanding that there are very real victims in this story. Kat Tenbarge, the young journalist that wrote the Insider article, her voice is prominent in this documentary. She talks about the characters in David’s videos and power dynamics, and I think there’s absolutely an underlying question of victimization or exploitation there, but what she revealed in her reporting was such a more overt and very literal exploitation. There’s a survivor. And in understanding that, it took a serious tone that really made me step back and reevaluate a lot of the more optimistic aspects of this story. Because if everything that had been done in his career, had ultimately manifested with people being victimized, then was it appropriate at all to celebrate any of it?

It’s quite a weighty question to have hanging over you for the time making this. What’s it like to be here at SXSW and put this out into the world?

Christine Vachon: It’s great. I think the movie’s incredibly compelling, and I can’t wait for people to see it.

Casey Neistat: And I just appreciate Christine saying that because I’m a ball of anxiety right now. I’m happy to finally get it in front of an audience and I’m looking forward to sharing it with people. I do think that there’s a real relevance to the story because while it does focus on one person very specifically, I don’t think you have to look very far to see that he is one person in a series of top-tier influencers that have had a similar rise and fall.

“Under the Influence” will screen at SXSW on March 16th at 1 pm at the Alamo Lamar D.

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