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“It Was All About Hanging On For Dear Life” | Ondi Timoner, Dig! XX
A still from DIG! XX, a Sundance 2024 40th Edition Celebration Screening. Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively?
The answer is The Road. It was made on the road. My brother David and I shot Dig! in a rumble tumble of different locations, be they vans, tour buses, different cities and countries from Europe to Tokyo, all sorts of venues from CBGB to the Knitting Factory to the Dragonfly to Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco, beneath Cleveland’s Communist Party Headquarters, to Pinkpop Festival in the Netherlands and Reading Festival in the UK—even as we were carted off to jail in Georgia!
Shooting Dig! was all about running and gunning, keeping up with the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols over seven years. And as the story twisted and turned and got crazier than anything we could have written, it was all about hanging on for dear life and figuring out the best possible formats to capture the different characters living their lives without interference. A true play at verité filmmaking.
For example, you’ll see a lot of the footage in the film is black and white. That’s because we used a B&W spy camera for its infinite low light capabilities, because so much of the film was shot at night. The cameras back in the 1990s did not have low light capability like they do today. The film was shot from 1996 to 2003, so it was shot on all different kinds of formats from regular 8mm to spy cam to mini DV to Super 8mm film, which we shot the whole time—and then Super 16mm as well towards the end to illustrate the Dandy Warhol’s success visually, which they accomplished towards the end of the original film.
Dig! XX is a new extended edition with 40 minutes of new scenes that are deep from the archives, but as good as anything in the original film or better, which add crucial and exciting context. It also features a new narration from Joel Gion of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, Anton’s right-hand man. We felt compelled to give fans and this next generation a deeper look into this amazing story, so we added Joel’s voice to Dandy’s frontman Courtney Taylor-Taylor’s narration of the original film. Now you hear from inside both bands and get treated to a jaw-dropping “where are they now” section that brings the tale up to today.
We’re super psyched to share this new upscaled, remixed and reimagined extended 20th anniversary cut at Sundance, where it took the Grand Jury Prize 20 years ago. We are very, very honored to be one of eight films from the past invited to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Sundance, and even more excited about the fact that it’s a brand-new edition we’re bringing.
See all responses to our annual Sundance question here.
