If you need an object lesson in how to lose friends and alienate people, Ondi Timoner’s documentary, Dig!, ought to fit the bill. The film chronicles the careers of two US bands — the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre — and the volatile relationship between their two leaders. By turns absurd, hilarious, stark and unsettling, Dig! exposes the dark underside of dreams of rock stardom. Imagine This is Spinal Tap, but directed by David “Blue Velvet” Lynch.
“I was trying to tell a story about the lives of artists,” says Timoner. “About everything from madness to friendship and commerce. I wanted to make it a universal story.”
Dig! juxtaposes the Warhols’ singer Courtney Taylor (who narrates) and his friend Anton Newcombe, Brian Jonestown’s self-destructive hub. The Warhols’ success comes about after they allowed their music to be used for a mobile phone advertisement, while the uncompromising Newcombe (who is seen assaulting members of his band and the audience) is left increasingly isolated by his refusal to make such concessions.
One of Dig!’s many subplots is the fracturing relationship between Taylor and Newcombe, but since the film’s US release there has been no love lost between Newcombe and Timoner. The musician has derided the movie, claiming that it reduces his art to “a series of punch-ups and mishaps taken out of context”. Timoner rejects the criticisms: “To be honest, I had to cut some of the most abusive moments and really infused the film with the compassion I felt for Anton as well”, but the attacks that he has made in interviews since Dig! won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance film festival seem to have hardened her attitude.
Advertisement
“He’s a real asshole,” says Timoner, who finally finished the mammoth task of editing Dig!’s 2,000 hours of footage in 2003, just before the birth of her son. “When I called Anton to tell him that I’d given birth, that I’d finished the film, and that it had been accepted in to Sundance he said: ‘You f*****d up. You haven’t cleared the music rights, so say goodbye to your son’s college education.’ It hurts on some personal level, because he is somebody who was like a brother to me at points. I just have to think it’s another conflict Anton has with himself. He’s threatening me because he’s being threatened by, perhaps, the biggest opportunity of success in his life.”
Timoner, though, has moved on. She is busy working on a documentary about the history of Jamaican music and is casting a new film with Michael London, who produced Sideways. But Dig!’s success means that she keeps getting pulled back in to Newcombe’s world. “I have been asked to do the Lolapallooza film,” she says. “Then I found out that the Brian Jonestown Massacre are on the bill. What’s Anton gonna say when he’s up there on stage, and I’m there holding a camera?” She smiles ruefully. “Stay tuned. . .”