David Farrier and Dylan Reeve followed one another on social media, but when Farrier received abusive messages from an American company in 2014, they teamed up to investigate. Their research led to a documentary about competitive endurance tickling called Tickled, released this month.

DAVID/ We debate this, but I think I first met Dylan at Kim Dotcom's house. It was when he restaged the raid. Dylan reminded me a lot of a school friend, who was this really smart, quite pig-headed, opinionated person. He also had this amazing beard.

But we mainly knew each other from Twitter. I'm on the internet a lot so you get to know someone through their tweets. He's quite similar [to his Twitter feed]. He's just very, very sure of himself. He's very direct; he doesn't mess around.

Lawrence Smith The two men say their friendship started after sharing mutual panic.

When I first started to look at competitive endurance tickling, I was writing about it on Facebook and Dylan started getting involved. While I was poking around, he was poking around as well, and we'd share information.

We both came under attack from this American company who didn't want us to be writing about them. There was unity in that – if I was getting crazy emails, or a weird letter from a lawyer, I'd call Dylan. He'd be like, "This happened to me!" We bonded in that way really – through panic. He was invested probably for a similar reason I was: We saw this company wasn't just bullying us, but there seemed to be a whole history of bullying. Dylan saw that as being incredibly important – it was wider than us, and a film would be a good way to stop this stuff happening.

READ MORE

* David Farrier's Tickled gets first NZ screening

* David Farrier's Tickled documentary set for NZ debut next month

* Legal threats over Tickled documentary

He's very good with his computer skills. A massive geek. While I tried to get people to talk and sit for interviews, he was doing background sleuthing on the internet. Dylan's got a great logistics brain so he was good at organising flights, making sure we had the right rentals.

We have very different personalities. I want everyone to like me all the time. I'll always be very conscious of that. He knows what he wants to do and he'll do it. When you see us on screen, you see we're different in the way we think about things.

There were heaps of arguments about the tiniest things, like font choices, spaces between characters. Everything. While arguing is quite annoying, it's also great – you're making a better film for it.

We started off probably more as colleagues – we had this shared passion for this movie about tickling – but we definitely became friends. I know his kids really well and his wife's great. We go to each other's birthday parties.

DYLAN/ I knew who he was and I'd seen quite a few of his stories. He was the guy who did funny cat stories. I'm probably in his [target] demographic. We were Facebook friends. There wasn't much physical contact until the weird messages kicked off.

David saw a link for this tickling thing. From his perspective, it would be a fun, two-and-a-half-minute story for Nightline. He posted on the Facebook page for New Zealanders who had done it to get in touch. The company replied, saying they didn't want anything to do with a homosexual journalist. I thought, that's insane, and started digging. I wouldn't usually do something like this. But once we started digging, it opened up to weirder things. We met up a week afterwards, and started blogging about it.

We became friends quite quickly. I'm not in his circle of friends – I don't hang out with his mates at fancy cafés in Ponsonby – but we're friends who work together.

We have personalities that complement each other quite well. We certainly had very little conflict. The few cases where we had differences of opinion, we talked it out pretty quickly. I think I got on his nerves sometimes. I get a bit panicky, and he can be quite a quiet person and withdraw into himself.

I think he felt the pressure more than I did because there were parts that were personally directed towards him. He could laugh it off, but it's hard to receive that. I think we both, at times, felt out of our depth, wondering if we'd made the right decision. Personally, it's been a bit tricky for both of us. But I never felt like he was suffering for his art.

In the film, you see him ask some questions and you're like, 'That's not a good question,' but it's because he's really in the moment. A guy shows us these letters he's received in the past. They're quite horrible letters – referencing the death of a family member. David says, "Those letters are horrible." Like, that's so obvious, but he's right there and really feeling it. That's an interesting insight into how he seems to be: He's not outside it, looking in – he's invested.

Us Two is a weekly series featuring interviews with two people who share an interesting bond or relationship.