‘We had even more fights than they show in the film': how we made Dig! with the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols

The Guardian

17-03-2025

I wanted to make a documentary about 10 bands on the verge of getting signed by record companies, to see what would happen to them. When I first heard the Brian Jonestown Massacre, I thought they were some lost band from the 1960s. But a friend told me they were alive and well – and that every label wanted to sign them. I filmed them soundchecking for an industry showcase gig at the Viper Room in Los Angeles, then they came over to my house, which is the backyard scene in Dig!
They were on the verge of getting signed, but had spent all their money on sitars and were taking the record companies off the guest list because they didn't want to 'give away' tickets. The gig itself ended up with fights on stage. It was the most incredible thing I'd ever filmed, but I ended up crying on Sunset Boulevard because the bouncer took the tapes, which took me years to get back. Outside the club, singer Anton Newcombe told me he was covered in 'blood from people's faces'.
The next day he told me: 'Forget those other bands. Go meet the Dandy Warhols. Together we're going to change the record business for ever and you can film us.' Within 10 minutes of meeting Dandy Warhols singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor, he told me: 'I sneeze and hits come out.'
Dig! looks at art versus commerce, friendship, collaboration and madness through the eyes of two lead singers who each possess what the other has not. Anton can live on the edge and make records for the price of a six-pack of beer. Courtney needs stability. I filmed the Jonestowns in Super 8 and the Dandys in 16mm and 35mm because they made it commercially. It made for a contrast: I wanted the footage to reflect the diverging fortunes of what Courtney calls the 'most well-adjusted band in America' – the Dandys – and the least well-adjusted.
When I started filming I was 23 and had no idea if it would see the light of day. Between 1996 and 2003, I shot 2,500 hours of footage. My child's birth prompted me to finish editing, so when I won the Sundance grand jury prize in 2004, I thanked him for the deadline.
Dig! is Romeo and Juliet, or the real-life Spinal Tap. The new cut – Dig! XX – brings the story up to date. Them becoming friends again and playing together is the last thing you'd imagine happening at the end of the original film. I recently lost my house in the California fires, but the raw footage was at my office and so survived. I found my Sundance award in the rubble.
If Ondi and Anton had discussed filming, the rest of us weren't privy to it. Suddenly we were outside the club, pissed off, with cameras in our faces. The gig had blown up but being in a film was a consolation prize. I thought: 'We'll blow all those other bands in the documentary away.' At first I was hamming it up for the camera, but later, when everything started sinking, the camera became a coping mechanism, or confessional friend.
Dig! was intended to be a celebration of scrappy artists socking it to the man, but turned into a film about the Dandys becoming a pop band and living the MTV life while everything fucked up around the Brian Jonestown Massacre. We had even more fights than are shown in the film but they were still relatively rare and they weren't all started by Anton. In the early days Anton had been a super-driven songwriter, but we were all a bunch of fuck-ups by then, at the end of the filming. I'd wink at the camera as if to say: 'Don't worry folks, everybody's fine, even though there's chaos reigning.' But I'd hate to be typecast as the party guy or court jester.
I lucked out at the end of the movie when I quit before things went full-metal blotto [he rejoined the band in 2006]. But when I see the original film now, I have no regrets. We had so much belief in ourselves, which wasn't blind illusion. Twenty years on, we're much mellower – most of the time. There haven't been any fights on the current tour, and we've got the place in pop culture we always imagined. In a way, it took everything we went through in Dig! to get to where we are.
The 20th anniversary expanded documentary Dig! XX is in UK and Irish cinemas for one night only on 25 March