Maverick documentary-maker David Farrier tackles his toughest and longest assignment in the new film Mister Organ.
The notorious Michael Organ first made headlines by clamping illegal parkers in Auckland and charging them hundreds of dollars to be released.
I have to confess I'd never seen a David Farrier documentary before this week. I know his previous film Tickled was very well regarded, as was a TV series called Dark Tourist - where he visits some of the most unappealing parts of the world.
But I'm always a bit suspicious of documentaries where the director puts himself firmly in the middle and makes it all about him. Of course these days that's most of them.
Mister Organ is Farrier's latest. It opens on a story he heard five years ago, about a shop called Bashford Antiques. The owner, Jillian Bashford, had a rather proprietorial attitude to her carparks, so she hired a man to clamp overstayers.
His name was Michael Organ.
Farrier wrote about Michael Organ at some length in his newspaper column. And then it went, as they say, viral. Meaning TV got onto it, and it became a nine-day wonder.
Organ was charging hundreds of dollars for a couple of minutes parking and gleefully getting into disputes over it.
What seemed a quirky Page 17 story took off - partly because Farrier decided it should.
As he says in Mister Organ, there has to be more to the story, and the facts seem to bear this out.
Organ has a long and checkered past, with inflated claims over who he is, and long, complicated court cases. Organ is an enthusiastic and successful bush lawyer.
And all the time, there are veiled hints from people who know Mr Organ that there's more - and more sinister - to come.
Everyone who ever met Organ over the years is clearly made uncomfortable - and in some cases, traumatised - by the experience.
But to Farrier's frustration, very few seem keen to go on the record. Until one day, Organ himself and his now girlfriend Jillian Bashford agree to be interviewed themselves.
Or rather Organ does. While Jillian hovers in the background - is she under Organ's mind control, or has she simply nothing to say? - Organ talks. And talks. And talks. And after a while you realise none of it seems to make much sense.
But like other conspiracy theorists we're all too familiar with, it seems to make sense while he's talking, with his hints of shadowy malfeasance and cover-ups, and the endless promises that all will be revealed when the time is right.
Eventually Farrier learns two things. First, once you open your door to someone like Mr Organ, your life is no longer your own for the foreseeable.
And second, having invested nearly five years in a film based on a promise that something will happen, you're eventually going to have to produce that something.
The good news for Farrier's movie - if not for Farrier himself - is that people start coming out of the shadows to talk about Organ.
They mostly say Farrier doesn't want to have anything to do with him. Which is a problem for a movie actually called Mister Organ.
But along with this possibly valuable footage is hours of apparently useless footage of Organ himself, happily showing off on camera.
And just as I was starting to think - like Farrier - that this was a story going nowhere, he pulls off a quite brilliant coup. One of those insights that make you look at the last hour and a half with different eyes.
Mister Organ was engrossing, even if at the end of it all you couldn't help feeling you'd been led - again like Farrier - down a series of garden paths.
