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Ondi Timoner: ‘I want to inspire people.’
Ondi Timoner: ‘I want to inspire people.’ Photograph: Michael Buckner/Getty Images
Ondi Timoner: ‘I want to inspire people.’ Photograph: Michael Buckner/Getty Images

From Dig! to Jungletown – how Ondi Timoner is 'kicking the door down' for female filmmakers

This article is more than 6 years old

Having completed her debut TV series, and with a film about Robert Mapplethorpe in production, the director talks about why she’s drawn to ‘impossible visionaries’

Ondi Timoner still has her first video camera. She called her Flo, and now Flo is in five pieces, stuck to the wall of Timoner’s office in Los Angeles. “I threw her off the roof of Capitol Records,” she explains, “because she stopped recording when I was shooting the Dandy Warhols at the beginning of Dig!.”

Dig! is the documentary that made the director’s name when, in 2004, it won the Sundance grand jury prize. Her original plan had been to make a film about the music industry and what happens when artists get signed to major labels – “the collision of art and commerce” – by following 10 bands for a year. She ended up with two bands, the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and spent seven years on tour with them, watching them fight and fall apart in a mess of heroin and resentment. It was during this process that Flo met her fate. “I filmed her flying down and breaking into pieces on 16mm. She was well-respected and documented,” she laughs.

Even on the phone, from her home in LA, Timoner, 44, is a force of nature. She is promoting Jungletown, her first TV series, a 10-part programme about a group of young people trying to create a sustainable community in the Panama jungle. Working out how to film a TV series is, she says, “rather death-defying”. Her voice is husky and she talks fast. She fizzes with contagious energy. She has won Sundance twice – for Dig! and, three years later, for We Live in Public, which told the story of Josh Harris, an internet pioneer who eerily predicted our loss of privacy with a near catastrophic spycam art project in the late 90s. She has since made feature films about Russell Brand and climate change, and is about to start final preparations for her first non-documentary movie, Mapplethorpe, in which Matt Smith will take off his Prince Philip crown to play the controversial photographer.

Timoner is drawn to subjects she likes to call “impossible visionaries”; so much so that she has done a TED talk about their shared characteristic. They are usually men, she says, although she is sad about that. “I wish there were more women in the collection, in the menagerie. I hope there will be.” People such as Brand and Anton Newcombe, the singer of the Brian Jonestown Massacre, “have to act impossibly. They have to have a certain nature or develop a certain staunch rebellious attitude to stick with their vision and belief in whatever they’re doing despite the doubt and ridicule that might come their way.”

She takes a breath. “I guess the reason I focus on them, which I can imagine is your next question” – it was – “is because I want to inspire people. And 25 years ago, when I started making films, my whole goal from the get-go was to inspire people to create and to follow their instincts and not allow the super-ego of society to tamp it down.” Even though her subjects are flawed, and she shows it, she believes that “their stories can be really inspirational to us to step out of line and to take things on that we wouldn’t otherwise take on, even if we do feel like we have limitations and faults. So that’s why I do it.”

Her films are particularly intimate and revealing, so much so that Brand, for example, severed ties with Brand: A Second Coming once it was finished, fell out with Timoner and asked people who had been interviewed in the film to boycott it. “He was going through a really hard time in his life, apparently. We have a mutual friend who told me Russell is planning to call me to apologise for not being able to support that film. He did everything he could to bury it because it was so authentic and he was vulnerable.” She’s optimistic that he will come around. “That relationship might be all right.” But, she’s at pains to point out, that’s not why she makes films. She agreed to document Brand (at his behest) because she thinks he’s brilliant, and the same logic applied to Dig!. “In fact I can’t finish a film unless I have compassion for my subject, or the audience won’t have that compassion and the film will fail. So with Dig!, I judged Anton. I was having a really hard time because I was super pregnant and I was watching him kick people in the head and so forth. I ended up having to take an hour out of the film and replace it with 40 minutes of, ‘Here’s why he might be doing that, here’s why we care about him. And here’s why he’s significant historically, in a cultural way.’”

Russell Brand in Brand: A Second Coming.

At times, Timoner doesn’t sound dissimilar to the impossible visionaries she documents. There’s something of the missionary zeal to her, too. She says jokingly that she often competes with her sister, a rabbi, to see who is having more of an impact on people’s lives. “We weren’t really raised religious but she had this calling and has become this rather illustrious rabbi, this rebel rabbi in Brooklyn. We kind of are after the same thing, and it’s funny because we always thought we were so different.”

So yes, she says, she has a mission, in a way, but it’s twofold: to get people to step out of line, but also to tell stories that take viewers to another place, and to make them think. “Somebody raised their hand at the premiere of Brand at the London film festival and said, ‘I changed my opinion of Russell Brand 19 times during the film.’ And I was never happier than to hear that comment. When we’re watching, it’s about us – we’re bringing ourselves to the table, you know?”

Timoner’s documentaries are notoriously massive ventures. Dig! took seven years; We Live in Public took 10 years. In Join Us, released in 2007, she infiltrated a religious cult to find out why so many Americans were drawn to them, while she spent two and a half years on the road with Brand. “I put my lifeblood into these projects. They’re very complex,” she explains. “They’re usually thousands of hours of footage and I’ve usually shot them and edited them as well as directing and producing.”

Timoner is also the CEO of production company Interloper Films, runs a web channel called A Total Disruption and for five years hosted a web series, BYOD, in which she interviewed documentary-makers about their work. She has a son, Juki, 13, and I wonder, plainly, how she manages to fit it all in.

“I’ve put personal relationships, aside from friends and my family who I’m very loyal to and I take care of, pretty much on hold,” she says, wryly. Since Juki was born, she has taken him all over the world with her. “His father [the photographer and filmmaker Vasco Nunes] was Portuguese and passed away in a motorcycle accident last year. We weren’t together, and for many years they had a tough relationship, so it’s hard because he’ll never be able to resolve it. So I really am it, at this point.”

Dig!, 2005.

Juki has been to Sundance 14 times, and she was breastfeeding him when she won for Dig!. “He’s been all over the place, from Bhutan to Jerusalem to your country, many times. He’s been raised that way. It was an experiment, a human experiment. And it’s come out really great. He can hold his own with confidence and strength and with compassion; so, so far so good on that front.” He is staying with Timoner’s mother in LA while she casts Mapplethorpe in New York, but he’ll be joining her on set as soon as he has finished the school year. “He’s worth making a documentary about actually,” she laughs. “But, too close to home for now.”

As a female director, and an award-winning one at that, Timoner is a rarity. The number of women in top jobs in film is dismal. In 2016, just 7% of the top 250 domestic grossing films in the US were directed by women, down 2% from the year before. At Cannes this year, Nicole Kidman pledged to work with a female director at least once every 18 months to address the imbalance. Timoner says simply that the way to get more women working is “by kicking the door down. Doing it ourselves. We prove that we can do it and we support each other in that process.” She says that because so much of the movie business is tied to the fiscal value of big names, Kidman committing to female-led projects is a good place to start. “For some reason there’s this glass ceiling on women, and women with budgets. In documentary you find a lot more women. We have an emotional intelligence and an ability to multitask that is widely known and appreciated but for some reason we’re held back into lower-budget stuff. Those numbers are pathetic, really.”

With Mapplethorpe, Timoner is stepping into that arena. She wrote the script and has had the rights to the photographer’s story and work since 2006, but it has taken more than a decade to get it off the ground, and she finally starts filming in July. As always, she’s drawn to the impossible visionary at its core. “It’s a very rich story about a cultural lightning rod, who in our country is probably one of the most controversial artists of all time. Back then, he was doing the unthinkable. Outrageously rebellious.” And as always, she will be asking her viewers to step out of line. “It will hopefully cause people to go do their own thing.”

Jungletown airs Sunday, 9pm, on Viceland

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