On 14 October, the Rome-based MIA shone the spotlight on one of the most successful non-fiction hits of the year, the Netflix documentary The Tinder Swindler. The one-hour discussion, moderated by Joel Zimmer, President of AGC Unwritten at AGC Studios, saw the participation of director Felicity Morris.
Before embarking on the direction of The Tinder Swindler, Morris had worked as a producer on several projects including the likes of Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer and Race for the White House.
The Tinder Swindler revolves around an Israeli man, born Shimon Hayut, who travels around Europe presenting himself as Simon Leviev, the son of a Russian-Israel diamond mogul named Lev Leviev. On Tinder, he would charm women with splendid gifts and a lavish lifestyle only to trick them into lending him money he would never repay. Moderator Zimmer told the audience that the feature is the most watched documentary on Netflix ever, with over 166 million hours watched during the first 28 days and appearing in the top 10 of 92 countries. The feature doc, released on 2 February, was also nominated for five Emmy awards.
First, Zimmer asked Morris: “Why such a broad appeal?” The helmer answered: “It’s a story that takes you all over Europe and through Israel as well. That’s a big tick in the box…At the heart of it, it’s about love, falling in love, wanting love, dating and dating apps. Just being called The Tinder Swindler was hooky. [Besides,] most of us have horror stories with apps.”
Morris added how it prompted the question, “how could you fall for it?” She then explained how everything started after she read stories about Leviev’s scams as published in the Norwegian magazine VG. At the time, the con artist was still at large and Morris expected to work on an open ending since she couldn’t predict his future arrest in Greece.
The project was originally formatted as a six-part story. Zimmer asked how Morris and her team decided to transform into a feature. “I developed it as a [long-form] story. Through the process you try to turn up every stone. […] I wondered whether this story could be spread into a series. You get everything on paper, when you’re selling it to Netflix, they want it multi-faceted, with many people to interview. […] We realised, however, that conned women were reluctant to be filmed. [After all,] the way he does the con is the same, so we didn’t want to stretch it so much and decided to focus rather on Cecilie and Ayleen’s [two of the victims] stories for the audience to understand them, live with them,” she revealed.
Zimmer pointed out how, unlike other Ponzi-type schemes, this was more “real” as it wasn’t linked to some shady crypto-currencies or more traditional forms of scams.
Morris agreed: “We had thousands and thousands of pages [archives of phone conversations]. You think of catfish stories, you think about people sitting behind a computer.” She explained that Leviev looked legitimate since he had social media accounts with many followers, he could be met in person while surrounded by some bodyguards and his entourage, so “there was no reason to doubt who he was saying he was.”
On the topic of using such social media archives creatively, Morris disclosed that the team could have recreated a WhatsApp-like environment, but it would have been hugely expensive to recreate graphics from scratch. They chose to go with screen recordings and used two phones acting as those of Leviev and the victim, respectively. They were filming both screens, sending messages back and forth and playing with the pacing, which could be later smoothened during the editing process. By doing this, they managed to recreate thousands of these messages.
Speaking about the score and the overall tone of the picture, Morris stressed how it starts as a big romance – a typical romcom with the “restaurant scenes and roses” – and then it turns into a horror, later into a thriller. Morris tasked her composer Jessica Jones to work on such a multiplicity of genres and to create specific themes for Leviev and his victims.
Towards the end of the panel, Morris elaborated on the bizarre interactions she had with Leviev. When she started making the film she spoke to his lawyer, offering Leviev to speak in front of the camera. After some time, he got back to say he was out of prison
and wanted to tell her “his own story.” After being in touch with two more lawyers, the team renewed their interview offer and Leviev signed a release form. Morris and her colleagues never really pushed for an interview, since they realised that “the film wasn’t about him, after all.”
After the start of production, Morris received some 20 messages in which Leviev was sharing news stories reporting he was going to be paid millions to appear in her documentary, while he was getting rich with cryptocurrencies, flying on his private jet and buying a property in Italy. Predictably, he was behind all of these articles. He asked once more to be interviewed and later threatened to sue the production. “After the film was released he went quiet. Then a few months ago he got in touch again, proposing us his own project,” she said, prompting great laughter.
