- One of the things that still bothers me
about this time in my life
and that keeps me up sometimes at night
is were we complicit in Luca's crimes?
(somber music)
- My name is Mark Lewis,
I'm the Director of Don't Fuck With Cats.
It's a documentary
series, it's a real story
but it functions, really,
almost like a thriller
and it's the story of the
almost kind of real time
evolution of someone who becomes
a kind of psychopathic
killer on the internet.
He broke, not even an unwritten,
a written rule of the internet set
on 4Chan and 7Chan which is.
- Don't fuck with cats.
- The perpetrator in this case
was somebody who started
abusing and killing cats
in videos on the internet
but it's really about the
sleuthing that goes on
to try and hunt him down.
- I wasn't gonna stop until I found him.
I've got this fucker.
- This was a real cat and mouse story,
but most importantly had
something very important
to say about the internet,
about internet culture.
Initially it was conceived
as a sort of 90 minute
feature documentary but as
soon as we went into production
we really began to see
that this was a story
that had kind of many more tentacles.
I mean we were constantly
discovering new things
which were changing our mind
and, of course, the production.
I mean at times we thought my God,
did he really do it?
We really did go on an
extraordinary kind of rollercoaster
journey of our own.
- I noticed that they
had also liked a video
for the movie; Catch Me If You Can,
which, to me, I took as a big hey, hey,
you're never gonna catch
me, ha, ha, fuck you.
- This was a story of a
man who perpetrated crimes
on the internet in order to
get people to come after him
and the more people that clicked and liked
and came after him,
the worse things he did
and that tells you something
about internet culture
and social media culture today
that we're all obsessed with
clicking and liking things.
In a way this is a kind of
perverse version of Instagram,
or perverse version of the Kardashians.
- Okay, this person wants to
play a game of cat and mouse
and I'm up for that.
- The question why did
we choose to focus on
the internet sleuths/detectives?
There were there right at the beginning
and they were there right at the end
and I think in terms of framing the film,
we had our kind of internet protagonist
but inevitably at some point in time
when the story becomes
not just playing around
on the internet trying
to hunt someone down
but rather a real world
story with real victims
the baton then gets passed
from these internet detectives
to real world detectives.
Both internet detectives
and real world detectives
are both sleuthing away and detecting
to try and put together the
whole puzzle by the end.
There are always in any film or series
people that it's difficult
for them to come on camera.
In the case of Benjamin Xu,
the best friend of the victim, Jun Lin,
you know, it's traumatic
to come and bare your soul
as he did.
His interview is incredibly moving
and I'm eternally
grateful that he was able
to speak about his friend
because I don't think
anybody could've communicated what he did
in the way that he did, but it's hard.
- [Deanna] How's it going?
- [John] It's going pretty
good, how about yourself?
- [Deanna] Yeah, good.
- [John] Vegas sucks.
- I don't think I have ever, or ever will,
film a pair like Deanna
Thompson and John Green,
I mean they were an
extraordinary double act.
They are chalk and
cheese and yet they found
this extraordinary common purpose I think.
I think they sort of, in to some degrees,
all of the people in that group
somewhat saved one another.
They were sort of bound by the horror
of what had happened
and what they were doing
and their determination.
It became almost an
obsession for them I think.
The deeper they got, the
more weeks and months
that they spent on it,
it became their lives.
At one point, this isn't in the film,
Deanna Thompson got a message,
she knew it was from him,
she suspected it was
from Luka at the time,
and weirdly it was this
quote from Nietzsche
which said "whoever fights
monsters should see to it"
"in the process he does
not become a monster"
"and if you gaze long
enough into an abyss"
"the abyss will gaze back at you."
And what that means is,
what the whole point is
is that the more obsessed
you become in hunting the monster,
you almost become the monster too,
you become as ugly and
obsessive as the monster himself
and I think that was this
sort of extraordinary moment
for her when she realized my God,
I've become, my world has become so dark,
I've inhabited the world
of this kitten killer
and murderer for so long,
or this wannabe murderer to the point
that I'm beginning to think like him,
I'm beginning to sort of feel like him.
(mouse clicking)
(somber music)
We had, fortunately thanks to them,
this extraordinary archive
of real information,
real posts, real comments, we had it all.
It was all sort of
screen shotted and so on
but we wanted to bring that alive
and actually there's great drama
and great personality and character
in what people write, what people say,
what words they choose
and how they write it,
how quickly it comes out.
We were trying to show how they felt
even in the way she
would type something out.
They told us what had
happened in an interview
but we wanted to make
their Facebook comments,
their communications between them
as dramatic, as real life,
as personality fueled
as they had communicated in the interview
and that was the whole point of the way
we presented those things.
- [Deanna] It's hiding a lot of his face
but you can see like fringey banged hair
and he's putting them into one of those
vacuum seal bags.
- Part of the story of the
film is of the kitten killing
videos and the murder video itself,
they are horrific.
We thought long and hard, okay, A,
we knew that we would never
show them in the documentary,
the certain frames in at the
beginning before the killings
of the animals or the murder
happened we could show
and there were certain
clues when you dive deep
into a particular image,
certain area of the image
where there is a clue,
we knew we would, we could
show those kind of things
but obviously we never
wanted to show the murder,
nor the deaths of the animals either
because that would be gratuitous and cruel
and unnecessary, but we needed to convey
how powerful it was, how emotional it was,
the people when they first
watched these animal abuse videos
because you needed to
understand why the internet
was so inflamed to come after him
so we talked with, John Green
had watched them many times,
Deanna, strangely, had never watched.
She loves animals, she loves cats,
she'd never watched the
videos all the way through.
She'd analyzed them frame by frame
and found pieces of evidence
but she'd never watched
it the whole way through
because it would be, she thought,
too traumatic for her.
But we talked about it
and how important it was
to convey that emotion and she, with us,
agreed that it was important to do it
because she needed to
make the viewer understand
this is the reaction that people had,
that my comrades in arms
had when we watched it
and this is why we came after,
this is what motivated us to go after him.
It took me ages to watch it actually.
I'd been working on
the story for some time
writing frames for things and I really
sort of slightly dreaded it really
but it was important to watch
because this was a story
of an investigation and only by watching
did, not only I understand
the clues that the detectives
were seeing, or the animal
activists were seeing
in the videos, but we saw clues ourselves.
There is an enormous twist
in the third episode,
one that you will not see coming
and there are many clues
in the murder video
that only we detected when we watched it.
It was a pretty horrific thing to do
and it still stays with me now
and I think that video has affected
so many people, including ourselves.
- Hi, my name is Luka,
Magnotta's my last name,
m-a-g-n-o-t-t-a.
- Did we ever want to film Luka Magnotta?
We had some correspondence from him.
We didn't instigate the
correspondence with him.
We decided not to do
an interview with him,
or sorry, not to try and ask
for an interview with him.
This was a series about
somebody doing terrible things
in order to court celebrity
and that to give him
a platform would be us
just feeding into that.
Luka is in a prison in a kind
of far flung corner of Quebec
in the north of Quebec and
I know that he's kept away
from internets and computers
for obvious reasons
so whether he would ever
see the film, I don't know.
For us the show was not really about him,
the show was really about
the internet sleuths
who were tracking him down
and it is the story of the
poor unwitting man Jun Lin
who was so cruelly murdered.
It's been an extraordinary
personal journey making this.
You can't make a series about
someone who's been killed
in such a horrific way and have watched,
seen things that I've seen
without it affecting you
very, very personally.
We're dealing with an
incredibly traumatic event
with incredibly traumatic footage.
Having to see it, having to deal with it
and I think it was just
important, I think,
that we kind of handled the
whole story with kid gloves
and tried to be as sensitive
as we possibly could.
- You're at home watching
a whole fucking documentary
about Luka Magnotta.
Are you complicit?
- There is this sort of
slightly daring moment
of film making where right
at the very, very end
of the series in the
third episode where Deanna
turns to the camera and addresses
the viewer, addresses you.
This is a complicated
story of internet activists
who may have in some
way fueled the killer,
to what degree were
they complicit in that?
It was so important that we address that,
I mean literally head on.
Equally, we're making a
television series about it,
are we kind of feeding
into the idea of celebrity,
and all the viewers of
Netflix who are watching it,
are we all in some way complicit?
And that was the reason behind
the addressing to camera
and I think in some ways in
the case of Luka Magnotta
we're probably all
responsible for creating
the monster a bit.
- Perhaps it's time we
turned off the machine.
- You can watch our documentary series;
Don't Fuck With Cats on Netflix now.
(dramatic music)
