‘Neighbors’ Directors on New Docuseries About American Dysfunction

“If you can’t get along with your neighbors, that kind of says something about you,” Seth Collins deadpans toward the end of the first episode of Neighbors, the A24 and HBO documentary series from director duo Harrison Fishman and Dylan Redford. Collins, a 9/11 truther and QAnon convert who sports a black MAGA hat and custom dental fangs, moved to rural Shawmut, Montana, in 2016 to build a bug-out — an off-grid fortress suitable for waiting out a plague or world war — and raise horses with his wife, Starla.

Everything was going fine, in Collins’ telling, until Josh Alspaw, a TikTok-famous blacksmith, and his family moved next door in 2020. Josh and his wife Brittany regard their neighbors’ horses as “nuisances and pests” and delight in chasing them off with their ATVs and dirtbikes. That habit didn’t endear the Alspaws to anyone nearby, including one neighbor who threatened to shoot Brittany after the Alspaws frightened his horses. Shortly after that blow-up, Josh installed a gate on the road that runs through his property — the most direct route between the Collins’ home and the free-range pasture — and began posting about the ordeal online. 

What started as good material for TikTok — the neighbor drama videos, Alspaw says, were generating ”hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views” — mutated into a legal dispute that ended up draining his family’s bank accounts and straining his marriage. But he remains dug in and unwilling to remove the gate. “If you’re in a situation like this, if you can move, I would,” Alspaw, a long sword in his grip, tells the documentary crew (without elaborating on why he can’t or won’t move himself). “If you can’t, be ready to defend yourself.”

Executive produced by Marty Supreme’s Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, Neighbors is a six-episode acid-trip tour of American dysfunction. Fishman and Redford trawled Craigslist and Facebook groups and local newspapers and court dockets, sifting through thousands upon thousands of potential storylines across the country, to find the roughly dozen pairs of neighbors they follow in the show. They had a few non-negotiable criteria for the disputes they ended up documenting: “It had to be ongoing, and we had to get both sides,” Fishman says. “And it had to feel like a contemporary American story — uniquely American.”

The pair first became obsessed with neighbor dispute videos back in 2019, as a lens through which one could better understand the social dynamics roiling the country. Like those early videos that captivated them, Redford says, each conflict on the show is “starting with something fairly concrete — it might even have seemed kind of mundane — and then coming to understand both people’s values and why there’s this misalignment.” The pandemic, Redford says, only supercharged these failures to communicate. “This really traumatic event has occurred that has affected everyone, and this social contract that maybe barely existed before has kind of broken,” he says. “We didn’t go into it thinking that that was going to be part of the show. But that’s definitely in the background.”

Each of Neighbors’ 30-minute episodes dives deep into a pair of conflicts like the one simmering between Collins and Alspaw. The fights erupt over rural gates and suburban fences, the stretch of sand behind a multimillion-dollar waterfront home and a narrow patch of grass dividing two modest bungalows. They are disputes that have boiled over between perfect strangers and once-close friends who attended each other’s weddings or comforted each other through a divorce. 

Surprisingly, these conflicts are not about politics — feuding parties’ voting preferences are only occasionally discernible, and never at the heart of their disputes. Yet they offer rare insight into the root causes of America’s fundamental brokenness. For as disparate as the settings are, recurring qualities in the show’s central stories emerge: The neighbors are often gun-happy (the ubiquity of firearms, Fishman says, initially took the filmmakers aback, before it “just became part of the tapestry”); a surprising number are exhibitionists (OnlyFans performers, nude models, former strippers, nudists); and nearly every episode features someone who subscribes to at least one paranoid conspiracy theory (the New Age belief in “starseeds,” or an earthly gene pool created by alien visits; David Icke’s reptoid hypothesis that shapeshifting aliens secretly control our world).

Neighbor disputes, Redford reasoned, follow a similar trajectory to conspiracy theories: There is a precipitating event and a disagreement over why it happened. After that, he says, both sides “retreat into their own worlds, they start looking online, and asking for feedback from people that they feel comfortable and aligned with. And they start building a narrative, and that narrative — maybe, potentially — starts really diverging from what may be an agreed-upon reality.”

“Conspiracy theories don’t have to be these crazy things about lizard people,” Redford adds. “We’re all very capable of telling stories and telling narratives that start to detach us from a shared understanding of reality.”

One person, for instance, might believe their property wall is evocative of an “Italian-French villa,” while their neighbor is adamant it’s giving “Osama bin Laden compound.” (Ironically, the neighbor leading the charge to tear down that wall is a former Texas state legislator who helped enshrine “castle doctrine” — the idea that a house is one’s fortress, a place you’re entitled to defend with deadly force if necessary — into state law.)

It’s not necessarily the points of divergence themselves that feel so illustrative of our current political moment, it’s their intractability. There is an overwhelming sense in Neighbors that there is no way to settle such conflicts without involving the cops, the city council, or Judge Judy (who weighs in on a dispute in one episode) — and even when a third party steps in, there is often a refusal to accept the outcome delivered by an outside arbiter. 

For that reason, the episodes almost never end with a tidy, satisfying resolution. “The cleanest version of the show [would be if] at the end of the episode everything’s resolved,” Fishman says. “The reality is, it’s just not the way these things work, because you might get an on-paper resolution, but the emotional conflict will go on, potentially, forever.”

Solving conflicts, he adds, “is really not what the purpose of our show is.” The point, rather, lies in finding some level on which the audience can empathize with each party in each dispute. Through their studied refusal to take sides in the fights, Fishman and Redford offer viewers the opportunity to do what the show’s subjects seem unable to do: place themselves in the other person’s shoes and really understand where they are coming from.

“None of this is clean,” Redford says. “It’s a much more complicated picture than, oftentimes, what we see online.” Take, for example, the neighbor who threatened Brittany Alspaw: It’s easy to make snap judgement based on the footage of him screaming, “You shut the fuck up or I’ll go get my gun and I’ll shoot you.” It’s harder to maintain that judgement once you see more footage of the same conversation, where he tells Alspaw he’d “love” to have the whole family over for barbecue sometime.

Even as Fishman and Redford insist they were never interested in solving the disputes themselves, they couldn’t resist trying — and ultimately failing — to help one pair of neighbors work it out. Over the course of filming, the directors learned that Collins and Alspaw, the neighbors in Montana, were both Dungeon Masters in the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. “We really wanted them to play D&D together,” Fishman says. “We were trying to get them to play D&D, and then at one point they were like, Guys, we hate each other. Like, He has a gate in the road. I don’t want the gate. Why would I play D&D with him?”