Caught in a YouTube wormhole, filmmaker Dean Fleischer-Camp discovered a trove of one stranger’s unedited family footage, each video with 80 views or less. They belonged to someone named Gary, who had unceremoniously shoved his camcorder into the face of his irritated wife and his two kids at home and during the family’s travels. It was innocent enough – boring, even. Fleischer-Camp became addicted. He asked Gary’s permission to use the hundreds of hours of footage he’d uploaded to YouTube for a project. What exactly, he didn’t yet know. Eventually, it would become Fraud, a fucked-up parable about a family struggling financially who commits a crime and hits the road. Together with editor Jonathan Rippon, he’d take hours of home video and edit it into a warped Bonnie and Clyde narrative. It’s a compelling, edge-of-your-seat tale of one family’s dark descent into a life of crime.

Except that none of this ever happened. At screenings of Fraud during Toronto’s Hot Docs festival, audiences stood up after the film and called him a “con artist” and a “liar” for labelling his work “documentary”. How could it be a documentary if it wasn’t true? Fleischer-Camp, who has enjoyed viral success before with his Marcel the Shell With Shoes On short films, shrugs off the haters. Reached by telephone over the American Thanksgiving weekend, he extolled the elastic definition of documentary and insists that Fraud is, in fact, some version of the truth.

How did the idea for Fraud come about in the first place?

Dean Fleischer-Camp: The idea for Fraud came from being an editor when I was younger and feeling it wasn’t very creatively powerful. So I started playing around with ways that you could recontextualise the footage that you’ve been given, making a little game out of it. So that’s where I got the idea that maybe you can make an entire feature out of somebody’s footage that tells a completely different story than what actually happened.

How did you find this footage?

Dean Fleischer-Camp: I don’t really remember, it must have been a suggested video based on something else (I was watching). It was just one of those YouTube holes that you find yourself going down. I was a casual fan of Gary’s footage before I even thought about making a project out of it. It was almost mesmerising to watch the way he documented his world.

How long did it take you from start to finish?

Dean Fleischer-Camp: I think it took about a year and a half from start to finish, but that was very off-and-on.

When you first asked permission to use these clips, what was the reaction?

Dean Fleischer-Camp: It took a little bit of convincing, because for someone to contact you out of the blue on the internet and to ask if they can use your footage is… Probably the wise response is, ‘No way.’ I found him on Facebook. I showed him some of my work, and some of it he had already seen, so he was pretty game. I didn’t have an idea of what it would be when we first spoke, so there was this vague thing of, like, ‘Could we make some kind of video project that uses your footage but tells a different story from it?’ He was really into that; it speaks highly of his creative willingness that he was game for this, that he was excited by it. We weren’t sure what the story was gonna be, so when the story became more about them committing a crime, and became this Bonnie and Clyde story, I got in touch with them and said, ‘Hey, it’s sort of started to take this dark turn. You guys being criminals on the run, is that cool?’ And he was OK with that. He watched the movie and the family was really into it, so I think I got lucky that they were so game.

They weren’t concerned at all being portrayed as criminals?

Dean Fleischer-Camp: The only concern is making sure that nobody actually thinks they committed this crime and make sure there’s not some investigation opened on this family or something. (laughs) I would feel terrible if something of that nature happened or anyone actually confused them for criminals or anything.

Did you have to manipulate much to bend the clips to fit the narrative you wanted when you’d finally landed on it?

Dean Fleischer-Camp: Oh yeah, for sure. It’s fully manipulated. Most shots are manipulated by the viewer in your head. So, for example, the car getting sunk into the lake, and you see Gary at the lake with his family, another YouTube clip of another family pushing their motorboat into the lake, and then you see the first clip from another YouTube channel of a towing truck company’s YouTube channel they had posted of them pulling a car out of a lake, so the first footage of that is reverse footage from that YouTube channel. And then it cuts back to Gary and he’s really excited about all this, with some audio from a different year, and he’s like, ‘Down, down, down, all the way to the bottom.’ He’s talking about shovelling show. And all these things in the viewer’s mind is, like, ‘Gary just sunk his car into a damn lake!’

While watching, I didn’t know which of the clips you used from Gary’s life and which were filmed or taken from somewhere else...

Dean Fleischer-Camp: Yeah. We didn’t film anything but we did take clips from elsewhere on YouTube, or other weird, Russian Dailymotion sites.

“It used to be that we judged our wealth and status in life on our neighbours and what we had access to. Now we have access to the Kardashians, and they’re on our Twitter feeds and they seem like our next door neighbour so I think people are feeling even more depressed” – Dean Fleischer-Camp

I know it’s unfair to judge these people, because it’s not their real story, but whenever we see them get money, they automatically go out for dinner, or to the theme park, or buy an iPhone or something and you’re thinking, ‘Are you dumb?’

Dean Fleischer-Camp: Yeah, well, we’re addicted to it. It’s guaranteed by the American Dream. Now it’s been exacerbated by the internet, I think. Now we have a window into extreme wealth all the time. It used to be that we judged our wealth and status in life on our neighbours and what we had access to. Now we have access to the Kardashians, and they’re on our Twitter feeds and they seem like our next-door neighbours so I think people are feeling even more depressed. But also there’s this governing idea, this model for happiness called the hedonic treadmill that my editor Jonathan and I talked a bit about, a model where everybody has a pretty specific baseline for happiness or contentment and regardless of changing circumstance we ultimately return to that. It’s an attempt at describing why people do, for example, win the lottery but become depressed when they win the lottery, or people who are poor but continue to be happy regardless of their poverty.

I saw some people were pissed off that you’ve called Fraud a documentary. How do you feel about that?

Dean Fleischer-Camp: I feel that it is a documentary. There was kind of a controversy because there were screenings where I got called a con artist. I obviously put a lot of thought into it. Documentary is founded on a paradox. Your basis for your average viewer watching a documentary is it tells a true story, but all documentaries take real footage and manipulate them a certain version of the truth, or a highly stylised, even fictionalised version of the events that actually happened.

Some of the earliest documentary films were entirely scripted and staged: Nanook of the North is a very famous example. It’s considered one of the earliest documentaries, but it came out years later that it was scripted and staged, so if you think that is a documentary then mine is completely a documentary. What that tells us is that documentary is a genre. It’s not some kind of journalistic endeavour. I don’t think it’s beholden to the truth. I hear a lot of documentary makers saying doc-making is lying to tell the truth. There’s a million tiny deceptions going on all the time, and the public rediscovers this every five or ten years and gets really pissed off like they did with The Jinx when they found out the timeline didn’t quite match up or something like that.

What defines a documentary is the intent.

Fraud will be doing a week run at the IFP Theater in New York starting January 20, 2017