Award-Winning Director Ondi Timoner Lives in Public

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Wednesday, 03 March 2010 05:00

Written by Brad Balfour

Director, producer and entrepreneur Ondi Timoner takes her mission to self-distribute her provocative feature documentary We Live In Public — winner of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize (which she won the year before for her challenging rock-doc DIG!) — to multiple venues throughout the country. Star Adrian Grenier hosted a New York City screening in the club Arena, and with live streaming at weliveinpublicthemovie.com (which is scheduled to run clips). We Live In Public was also the closing night film for Lincon Center's 2009's New Directors/New Films festival.

In addition to a screening, a coordinated event held in Chicago, Illinois featured a 24-hour recreation of Josh Harris' infamous and groundbreaking performance-art video Quiet , in which he curated and funded an underground bunker in New York City where over 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days at the turn of the millennium. The Chicago bunker featured live performance pods, including fire throwers, trapeze artists and celebrity DJs.

We Live In Public was released worldwide on March 2, cross-platform, via digital (iTunes), VOD and DVD.The documentary on several episodes in the life of Internet pioneer Harris, who created the first Web conferences; an online television network, Psuedo, before there was really broadband on which to transmit; and the envelope-pushing art event called Quiet ; and who video-documented himself and his girlfriend 24/7 as part of a cultural and psychological stress test. Harris has been praised and castigated: Some think he's genius, others, a loon.

The intense Timoner has made other provocative films such as DiG! — a strange expose of the rivalry between two rock bands and the psychological damage done along the way — but with this film she has grabbed whole cloth the idea of "indie" and is doing it herself, from production to distribution.

Q: We Live In Public is about so many things; it's this review of counterculture and subversive culture, art culture, high/low culture; but how did you first intersect with Josh Harris?

OT: I actually started working at Pseudo in 1998. I was here shooting with [photographer/director] David LaChapelle for something I haven't finished, which is called Artists and Prostitutes; before his book I was calling it that. I met him through The Dandy Warhols who was shooting the "Junky" video and I was shooting DiG!, and he and I hit it off a lot so I started filming him in his studio and also filming.

They were having sort of a downturn in their love relationship with Capitol Records, and a friend of mine, Jodi Wille — she has a company now called Process Media, where they put out some really excellent, interesting books — she recommended that I go down to this place called Pseudo that was on the corner of Houston and Broadway, and she said, "It's an Internet television network," and I said, "Internet television network? What is that?" and she said, "I don't really know but it's apparently pretty extraordinary; you should go down there and check it out."

So I went down to pick up some extra cash and was really blown away by the state of the studio. Just state of the art studios, like CNN or some major network, but literally no one could watch. I mean 0.1% of the population maybe had anything but basic dialup and there was no broadband. So it was just incredible and we were paid very well to shoot programming that was extremely niche and the quality of which was quite questionable.

I worked on Tanya [Corrin]'s show [on Pseudo], Cherry Bomb, and that's how I was able to get that interview with her which was pretty much a linchpin interview in the documentary. But it was 2006 when I got that interview with her, when she's pregnant. She wanted nothing to do with Josh at that point but because I had had a relationship with her through Cherry Bomb I was able to get that. So I worked there for a little while; I met Josh but he doesn't really remember meeting me, and then the following year he was contemplating The Bunker and he called me, I was back in Los Angeles...



Q: So you've always been based in Los Angeles?



OT: Pretty much.



Q: You never really made a full move to New York.



OT: Well, you know, I was born in Miami, Florida, and I went to school at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut. So I would come down to the city all the time, and my first job in documentary was interning at WNET; it was PBS' American Masters, and it was Helen Whitney, and it was Richard Avedon. So I would come into the city.



Q: So you started out with a more traditional documentary background.



OT: No, I didn't fit in. 



Q: You are a bit gonzo.



OT: I'm a bit gonzo; correct. When I was at Yale, Yale had no production facilities so I found a public access station opening right at that time in New Haven called CTV: Citizens Television. And they had this deal where I went to the opening orientation and they said, "If you let us show whatever you make you can sign up for three hour chunks of time to edit on our systems."

And it was a shuttle editing system where if you change one thing you have to change everything after kind of thing. But basically I just went out with a consumer video camera, and my first film was called 3000 Miles and a Woman with a Video Camera, where I just drove across the country on spring break with my roommate and my brother David who was my collaborator for a very long time.

Actually, he and I started Interloper Films together, my little brother; he was a freshman when I was a junior at Yale, so we were in school together, so we would go to the public access station and cut footage together. So we just started doing things; we went across the country and I interviewed people in tollbooths and convenience stores about what they feared the most, what made them the most happy, and these debates would start.

I realized, oh my God, with a camera I can bridge into this other world and I can start talking to people and they'll answer me and they'll start talking. So I asked this one guy, "What do you fear the most?" and he went, "Women with video cameras." So it was called 3,000 Miles and a Woman with a Video Camera; that was my first movie.

Then I went ahead and did another one, which is kind of interesting. It just came up in a meeting downstairs, called Reflections on a Moment: The Sixties and the Nineties and it was about Hunter S. Thompson — who I also wrote my high school term paper about — his work; it wasn't really him in it. It was about the idea that those of us who were coming up in the '80s and '90s missed it; we missed the time when there was something to root for or something to fight against. There was nothing, there was nothing for us, and I was like, this is a problem with my generation.

So I went to [Grateful] Dead shows and I documented people about Hunter S. Thompson and everything from the '60s, that spirit that somehow we didn't have, and I felt like I had been born too late.

Now, I'm lucky enough to be breaking bread with D.A. Pennebaker and DiG! is ranked number two behind Don't Look Back and Pace Magazine is like, "the rock film of all time," and this man downstairs was just comparing my work to Frederick Wiseman, saying there's no documentary filmmaker today that's closer to Frederick Wiseman than I.

To me, Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies is one of the most amazing films that I've ever seen. So I just had this revelation this morning that maybe I wasn't born too late; maybe I was supposed to actually be carrying the vérité tradition into this time, and actually that would be the thing I'm proudest of. If that's true, if I'm carrying the torch of some of the fantastic work that was done back then in terms of documentary, that's a great accomplishment.



Q: Films like yours show that this continuity goes beyond the '70s. The film contributes to making that statement. When I participated in Quiet I felt like it was a direct link (even though I didn't stay in the bunker), and that's why I think it's important you get this out there.



OT: It's not conscious right? It is just me and it's what I'm here to do. Josh called me; let's be clear about that. It's not like I sought him out and said, "Oh my God, I have to document this bunker."

He invited me to film this and I said, "What do you have in mind?" and he said, "Do you want to document cultural history?" and I said, "Well always, but what do you have in mind?" and he said, "I don't know really what it's going to be, but it's going to be at the end of the year and all these artists are coming together doing their installations. And I'll tell you this; if you are interested, I'll give you whatever resources you need to make it happen."



Q: Had you met him when he was doing the Jupiter Conferences — the seminal Internet events? that's when I first met Josh.



OT: No, I had no idea who this guy was. A lot of people were saying he's a businessman trying to buy his way into the art world, he's a buffoon. I didn't know what he was, all I knew was that when I went down there, I was actually living in LA but I came to New York to make a pilot for a VH1 show that I had created for VH1 called Sound Effects; it was about music's effect on people's lives, quite an incredible show.



Q: How long did it run?



OT: It only ran one season and I actually resigned because it was being so mishandled by the executives. It was kind of the dark ages of VH1. Lauren Zalaznick was the head and she was based in New York so she really didn't have a handle on what was going on in LA. I interviewed 250 people around America about how a song would affect their lives, like if the lyrics stuck in their head.

It's usually a pivotal moment, like in my case I heard Bob Marley's "High Tide" when I found out I was pregnant. Like, if you had a divorce, or your first kiss, so these stories that people would tell about this death-defying car accident, and how this one guy survived thanks to Bruce Springsteen's record coming out. Incredible series.



Q: Did you retain the rights?



OT: Nope; it was a big learning experience for me at the age of 27. It helped to push me down the road of independence, which I seem to be charging down. I think that We Live in Public is holding a torch right now; we're kind of blazing a trail — if we succeed — and it is the Wild West still on the Internet.

I mean, it's all coming to, so we're a little early. But using very little marketing money and reaching our audience directly as we are trying to do, and having important and influential supporters like Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Eliza Dushku, Jason Calacanis, or Fred Wilson putting our widget on their blog, or tweeting out.



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