The “Public” Life of Ondi Timoner

The "Dig!" director talks Twitter, the perils of the Internet, and her new movie.

It’s so easy to be unconscious and to just feel good and to feel intimacy over the Internet and it’s not an intimate forum. Intimacy between us in the physical world, that’s the only intimacy that there is. I’m worried that this next generation is letting it all hang out there and there will be a price to pay. The technology’s inevitable. The human drive for that attention and connection will never stop, it’s innate. Society makes us all want to be famous because that’s equated with happiness in America. Josh Harris is the best cautionary tale you can find, because he overloads and ultimately has to cut himself off. Why? Because to him growing up, “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” that was the golden lamb. So I feel like the film is very prescient to raise awareness and ask questions while being entertaining.

There seems to be a pretty strong connective tissue between this and “Join Us” and “Dig!” On what level did your previous films help you understand what was going on throughout this process, and was that something you were aware of as it was unfolding?

I think the connection is going deep into worlds you would never otherwise enter. You never saw rock ‘n’ roll like you do in “Dig!” because I lived it. I slept on the dirtiest couches in America, I lived with these people — they ran to my house when they were bitten by Anton [Newcombe, the lead singer of The Brian Jonestown Massacre]. Anton slept on my floor, Courtney [Taylor, the lead singer of the Dandy Warhols] slept on my bed when he broke up with his girlfriend to recover for a month, and when he would pick up the phone and call Anton, we’d record the phone calls. I’m deep in there and that’s where I like to be. I realized when I was 19 years old and picked up a video camera that it was a bridge into worlds I could never otherwise enter, and that if I capture those worlds, I could communicate out everything I learned and just bring everyone with me. Which is such a dream. It’s my way of not feeling alone – to share with you, years of my life that I’ve lived and experienced, now you’ve been there too. I get to take you with me. And I love that.

So with “Join Us,” I felt like it was important to get the cult leader, to turn black and white into grey, to take these difficult characters and somehow make them relatable and understandable, [which] is another wonderful challenge that I enjoy with Anton or with Josh Harris, another megalomaniac male — somehow I attract those guys, and he’s also a walking cautionary tale, like Anton, and a visionary. I love that because all of them, their flaws are right there and I don’t hide them. They’re as important to the narrative as anything else.

I’ve heard you say in previous interviews that you and Josh share the idea that life should be documented, but after this experience, have your ideals changed in that regard?

When I started shooting “Dig!” at 23 years old, I thought, okay, there’s been no film that’s followed life as it unfolds, none yet. That’s why my first feature, “The Nature of the Beast,” is on PBS, and that’s why people don’t watch documentaries, [and] that’s why I’m not going to get this woman who is the subject of the film out of prison, because they think it’s too educational to be entertaining. So I set out to document all of life. I shot 2500 hours of footage [for “Dig!”]. I didn’t realize that would make me be in the edit bay for three and a half years. I was more economical with “We Live in Public,” only this time, my subject was obsessed with documentation — he documented thousands of hours of footage. Suddenly, I’m with 5000 hours of footage again. And thank God because it’s all viscerally told and when I wasn’t filming, Josh [started] WeLiveinPublic.com with his girlfriend. I should give surveillance cameras main [cinematography] credit on the film.

In my personal life, I spend a lot less time holding a camera than I used to. I still take a lot of pictures. I still celebrate things and people and events that I love with a camera because it’s an inherent drive of mine. I still record my favorite answering machine questions to DAT. It’s part of my nature, but I realized that I was mediating my life with a camera towards the early 2000s and I slowed down on my personal life like that. But my poor five-year-old son, he’s documented, don’t you worry.

“We Live in Public” is the closing night film of the New Directors/New Films series at Lincoln Center on April 5th. It also screens at Full Frame in Durham, North Carolina and the Sarasota Film Festival in Florida.

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