Multi-award-winning filmmaker Ondi Timoner has amassed a wide-ranging body of work about people she calls “impossible visionaries.” Her documentary subjects tend to stray from social convention and take the path less traveled, which can sometimes put hers in impossible situations. I imagine that nothing was more difficult than making Last Flight Home, a 2022 film that documented her father Eli Timoner’s decision to intentionally put an end to his long, extraordinary life.
Dig! was hard to make for other reasons — unhinged rock ’n’ roll madness reasons. This DIY film, which established Timoner as a vital cinematic force, followed the twisted paths of two bands that were locked in an absurd rivalry: The Dandy Warhols and Brian Jonestown Massacre. Shot between 1996 and 2003, largely by herself and her brother David Timoner, it was a chaotic family affair. The siblings wound up stranded and homeless on the streets after BJM imploded one night on tour, and Ondi also landed in a Georgia jail after riding in a van with a bandmember who was caught with weed. But it was all worth it.
Dig! won the 2004 Sundance Grand Jury Prize — which Timoner would win again for 2009’s We Live In Public — and it went on to become an eminently quotable cult classic. Dandy Warhols frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor quips, “I sneeze and hits come out,” while BJM ringleader Anton Newcombe gets into a fistfight with his bandmates and exclaims, “You fucking broke my sitar, motherfucker!”
From a major label perspective, the Dandy Warhols’ pop hooks and their lead singer’s good looks (complete with made-for-music-video cheekbones) made them a much better bet. Less likely to succeed was BJM, whose unstable frontman had a penchant for starting onstage altercations with his group and the occasional unfortunate audience member.
Ondi Timoner visited Iowa City last February for a sold-out screening of the newly released extended 20th anniversary cut, Dig! XX, followed by a Q&A. She also received FilmScene’s Cinema Savant Award, which was given to Werner Herzog the previous year. It was especially poignant for Timoner because her home had just been swallowed by the Altadena fire in Los Angeles two weeks earlier. Her brother David, who lived nearby, also lost all his possessions.
“It’s the first award of my post-fire life,” she said. “To be acknowledged as somebody who made that kind of contribution to cinema is really beautiful, and it feels good to be in such great company. I’ve known Werner Herzog for many years. We shared office space, and he’s obviously a legend, and the other recipients are also equally phenomenal filmmakers.”
Timoner’s origins as a filmmaker stretch back to the early ’90s, around the time she founded the Yale Street Theatre Troupe while in college. “I wanted to unite with other artists at Yale University and try to bring politics into the street,” she explained. “It was just really fun to be out on the street and disrupt people’s everyday routines and cause trouble — you know, in a good way.”
Before she started Dig! in 1996, Timoner made 3,000 Miles And a Woman With a Video Camera when she and her college roommate were driving across the country with David. “That film was just me discovering the magic of holding a camera, which enabled me to ask strangers all kinds of questions,” she said. “Buying a bag of chips at a convenience store was infinitely more interesting with a camera in my hand. It got its name because I asked this one guy what he feared the most, and he said, ‘Women with video cameras.’”
Timoner’s street theater and guerrilla filmmaking background helped prime her to document provocateurs like BJM’s Anton Newcombe. “I’ve always been drawn to people that draw outside the lines,” she told me. “People who push boundaries and make us think differently about what’s possible. People who empower us to try to do things that might seem crazy at the time, but the world would be a more interesting place if we went for it. And Anton certainly fit that description.”
Ondi and David were a team throughout the making of Dig! until he had to take a step back after becoming a new father. Needing a little more stability than the crazy rock-and-roll life they were living, David wound up working in reality television while she finished the film. But when it came time to revisit Dig!, he was finally in a position to dive back in as the editor of the XX version.
“It was really fun,” he said. “It was a grind, but it was still so much fun. I have never been on a project where I laughed more. It definitely didn’t feel like work.”
One idea he brought was to expand the narration — which was originally voiced by Courtney Taylor-Taylor — so that it was supplemented with counterpoints by BJM bandmember Joel Gion. “I’d been staying in touch with Joel over the years,” David told me. “I saw that he had a Patreon page going, and I was supporting that because he’s a really great writer. He’s really hilarious and he had such a funny inside perspective on the Brian Jonestown Massacre, so we asked him to add more narration.”
It was a blast for this sister-brother team to brainstorm and reimagine the film, and the fun has continued as Dig! XX makes its way into the world.
“We did a Q&A last night together,” Ondi said. “I do Q&As for my movies all the time, but it’s always better doing it with David. We’re not like siblings that just see each other at Thanksgiving. We raised our kids together and, until both our houses burned down, we lived down the road from each other. So it’s just more like, ‘Let’s get the families together and then sneak off and work on Dig!, you know?”
Kembrew McLeod always reserves the right to rock. This article was originally published in Little Village’s April 2025 issue.
