Inside 'Fyre,' the Netflix documentary that everyone will be talking about
It was easy for most of us to mock the Instagram influencers and trust-fund millennials who were duped into attending Fyre Festival, the 2017 “immersive music festival” that turned out to be little more than a handful of disaster tents and slapped-together cheese sandwiches on a strip of rubble in the Bahamas. But Fyre director Chris Smith wasn’t interested in “a movie that made fun of people,” as he told Yahoo Entertainment. Instead, Smith looked for the people on the ground: event planners, programmers, construction workers and others who worked in good faith to make the Fyre Festival a reality. None of them realized they were in thralled to a hustler, a charismatic young entrepreneur named Billy McFarland who is now serving a six-year prison sentence for fraud. (Co-founder Ja Rule, the celebrity face of the festival, has not faced significant legal repercussions.)
By bringing on producers who worked on Fyre Festival marketing and tracking down ex-employees of McFarland’s business ventures, Smith collected an incredible amount of behind-the-scenes footage that allows viewers to experience the festival’s alluring vision, doomed planning process and disastrous collapse firsthand. But the film isn’t just about Fyre. It’s about the seductive illusion of social media, the decent people who unknowingly enabled a conman and the real human cost of McFarland’s very expensive lie.
As fate would have it, Smith’s documentary Fyre (which premieres on Netflix today) is streaming in competition with a different Fyre Festival documentary, Fyre Fraud, on Hulu — a film that levels charges of bias against Smith. In addition to addressing that controversy, Yahoo Entertainment spoke with Smith about telling the Fyre Festival story, trying to get justice for the Bahamian workers, whether he reached out to Fyre’s biggest celeb booster Kendall Jenner — and does he still use Instagram?
Yahoo Entertainment: This film builds such a delicious sense of schadenfreude, and just when you’re enjoying it a little too much, it punches you in the gut with how people were genuinely hurt, how Instagram grooms us to believe lies and how people like Billy McFarland are never truly forced to reckon with the consequences of their actions. Does that progression at all mirror your experience of making the documentary?
Chris Smith: You know, I didn’t set out to make a movie that made fun of people. I don’t think that’s a real worthwhile pursuit. I feel like there are better stories to tell. But definitely, I knew the story like everyone else, which was a very one-dimensional portrayal of rich millennials who got stuck on an island in the Bahamas. And I was interested to see if there was a more human story behind Fyre, if we could create something that was more relatable to the experience of people that were on the ground and the people that were affected by the festival.
You have a really astonishing amount of footage involving Billy McFarland that you presumably didn’t shoot, including a video of him illegally launching another fraudulent business while he’s out on bail. How did you collect all that?
That was probably one of the most challenging parts of the movie. I was working with another producer named Mick Purzycki [editor’s note: Purzycki is the CEO of Jerry Media, the marketing team hired by Fyre] and the two of us took on this almost archaeological project of trying to reconstruct what happened, through footage that existed. Of course we’re going back and doing interviews to retell the story. But we wanted to make it as visceral as we could. We wanted the audience to feel like they were going on the journey as it happened, as opposed to trying to make a film that was purely looking backwards.
It really feels like you’re there in the trenches as this thing unfolds. How did you figure out who your main characters were?
The first interview I did was with Gabrielle Bluestone, who was a journalist at Vice. She had been doing a lot of the coverage on Fyre, and she made some introductions to people that she had talked to, and through them, it just sort of kept going and going and going. The interview that made me realize that there was a movie here was Marc Weinstein, who was one of the event producers. We went to film in L.A. and I was thinking it would be 45 minutes or an hour, we’d just quickly get his story and move on. And once we sat down, it was a 3 1/2 hour interview where he was able to shed so much light onto Fyre and his experience with the festival. One of the things I loved about Marc was that I felt like he gave the movie a soul. He was able to look back at his time and he was able to reflect in a way that I thought was really poignant.
I was thinking about American Movie [Smith’s acclaimed 1999 documentary about amateur horror filmmakers], and how that film was about these guys who have this dream that seems impossible, but we’re really rooting for them. This movie is about a guy with a dream that seems impossible, and we hate him. Did that cross your mind while you were making Fyre?
It crossed my mind because they’re similar but very different. But I think in the end, what’s surprising is that you realize how many likable, hard-working, thoughtful and caring people were involved in the production of the festival. A lot of the contractors that were brought in were really dealt a bad hand of cards. You know, they were brought into this thing six to eight weeks out, when they should have had something closer to a year to try to pull this off. And so I felt a lot of sympathy for them in their situation and found myself sort of rooting for them to succeed. I felt like in their retelling of the story, you really got a sense of sort of how much of a disaster this really was and what they were facing.
I was kind of destroyed by Maryann, the restaurant owner who lost her life savings paying back her employees after McFarland stiffed them.
To me, that’s when it hit the next level, going down to the Bahamas and actually spending time there and talking to the people who were directly affected by the festival. It’s very easy to look at that from a distance, but to actually be there and sit with them — you know, when we went to film with Maryann the first day, she just yelled at me for an hour and we ended up leaving. We didn’t even film because she was just, you know, “I don’t want anything to do with Fyre.” We went back the next day and she sat down but very reluctantly shared her story. But it was so powerful, the recounting of this experience from her point of view.
Do you know if anyone has taken up the cause of representing the locals or raising money for them?
You know, it’s a complicated thing. But I’ve actually been in talks with Maryann and we’re setting up a GoFundMe account because everyone that sees the movie asked me how they can help her. [Here’s the link to Maryann’s GoFundMe.] So that’s there. The problem with all the locals is that there were, as the film mentions, hundreds of day laborers, so figuring out the apparatus to manage that is proving to be a challenge. But it’s definitely something that we’ve been trying to explore. With Maryann it’s very easy because she’s an individual, and from what I could tell from being down on the island, she was one of the people who suffered the most.
Why were all these smart, hardworking people so loyal to Billy McFarland? What kept everyone going right up until the end, even after it seemed doomed for failure?
You know what, I think it’s a little hard to see in the footage, but from all accounts of most of the people that we interviewed, Billy was incredibly charismatic and he was great at selling the dream. I think that he was very good at motivating people to continue to push forward even in the face of adversity. And a lot of the event people expressed to me that many events are difficult, and they feel like it’s not going to work or not coming together, and you just persevere and then it usually does. In this case, I think everyone was aware that the festival would not, you know, be reflective of the promotional video that they had put out. I think everyone had accepted that this was going to be something different, but I think that they felt that the version they were trying to achieve was obtainable…
It’s easy to see an event that failed, and look back and say. “Of course, this was never going to work and everyone should have known this.” But I think when you’re in it, and you’re on the ground and you’re doing everything you can to pull this off, that you can lose objectivity.
That makes sense.
And I also think — I haven’t confirmed this with anyone — but there’s also, I would imagine, a feeling of responsibility that you’re in this with all these people, and you know that if you pull out, that it’s only going to make their job that much harder. I wish I would have asked that question. But looking at this group of people, I would imagine that was part of the motivation.
I was really struck by Marc Weinstein saying, “Maybe by solving problems, we were just enabling them to continue to create this monster.”
Yes, 100 percent. They had a catering company and then that fell apart, so yes, if Andy [King, one of Fyre’s investors] hadn’t figured out a solution, then the whole thing would have just been canceled. Yeah, I think that they were continually overachieving and keeping this thing on life support. Which in the end maybe helped to prolong the inevitable.
I’m aware that you didn’t talk to Billy McFarland because he demanded payment and you found that ethically questionable. Did you try to get Ja Rule, the supermodels in the promo video or any of the other celebrities who attached their names to the festival?
I wrote to an agent that represented a lot of the models and never heard back. So we made overtures and we tried, but with many of the people associated with Fyre, I think a lot of them wanted to put it behind them.
Did you try to get a comment from Kendall Jenner, who was reportedly payed $250,000 for one Instagram post promoting the festival?
No.
Two Fyre Festival documentaries were released this week. As an outside observer, it seems like that’s happening a lot now, where more than one director is tackling the same subject and it becomes a de facto competition. Is that just the state of making documentaries now?
There are so many platforms now, there are so many streaming services, there are so many outlets looking for content. So that’s one contributing factor. The other is this, there are so many people chasing a finite number of stories. I don’t remember ever doing anything [before Fyre] that was from the news, that could result in in a situation like this. Usually they’re more singular. But this, I found the story to be interesting and the world to be interesting, and the more we got into it, I became very interested in trying to tell the story from an insider’s perspective. And that, I felt like, was unique and was something that was less like a news piece and was more like a movie.
Do you want to address the charge that comes up in the Hulu documentary Fyre Fraud that your working with Fyre Festival marketing people (from Jerry Media and Matte Projects) on the production is a conflict of interest?
Yeah, I’m happy to talk about anything. There’s a lot of people making accusations that have not seen the film. I assume that they think we probably didn’t cover [Jerry Media] deleting the comments section or things like that — that these are going to be bombshells [in Fyre Fraud]. To me, our goal is to tell the story and create a movie that was as accurate of a reflection of what actually happened as we could. Talking to the people that were on the frontlines was what made the movie interesting, so working with people that have access and people that had footage was crucial in telling the story, as long as there wasn’t interference in terms of what we could cover or questions that could be asked.
We had full access to inboxes. There was nothing that was hidden from us. We could ask questions about anything. Also, Matte Projects was hired to do the promotional video — and as reported to us, they were owed $250,000, and so they parted ways and stopped working with Fyre entirely, pretty early in the process. Jerry Media, from what I’ve been told and what we researched, had a contract to help manage Fyre’s social media feed. The marketing of Fyre, the brilliance of the launch, was really Billy and Grant [Margolin, Fyre’s chief marketing officer]. They came up with the orange tile and they’re the ones that brought in all [the influencers and models]. So Jerry Media basically was doing graphic design. They were taking assets that were from that original model shoot and creating imagery that was then being sent to Grant for approval, then posted it on the Instagram channel. I think a lot of people aren’t aware that there are marketing companies that manage social media accounts. If that’s surprising to people, I guess that’s an interesting thing. But if you have specific questions, I’m happy to answer anything.
I was just interested in your reasoning for taking them on as co-producers. Honestly, I didn’t realize that was the case until after I watched the film, and I was surprised; the marketing people don’t exactly get off easy in Fyre.
Actually, my editor said to me, “I wouldn’t even include this deleting-comments section.” He just felt like it was just such a footnote… For us, the story was much more on the island, with the people that were on the ground trying to pull this thing off. So we looked for as much dirt as we could get on [Jerry and Matte]. That was our goal because we knew that we would be under this microscope. And if anything, I think we tried to paint a more negative picture just to compensate.
It’s hard to watch McFarland without thinking about Donald Trump, though his name never comes up. Were you tempted at any point to explicitly draw that comparison?
I mean, it was so obvious that it felt insulting to spell it out.
The surprising thing that has really stuck with me about Fyre is the idea that this festival was “Instagram brought to life.” And it was a complete illusion. Did making this film change your feelings about social media?
I think social media is continually evolving. And I don’t know if everyone is experiencing this, but I felt like even at New Year’s this year, you were seeing people post things like, “I went to bed before midnight,” sort of trying to show a more real version of their lives. It feels like that there’s a trend towards more transparency and more authenticity. And so I don’t know if that’s a reaction to an era where everyone was trying to portray only the good, but it definitely feels like, at least in my feeds, that people are trying to share something that’s a little bit more authentic.
So you still use Instagram?
Yeah.
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