SHALLOW GRAVE

Making a film about perennial cult band The Brian Jonestown Massacre and its madman leader all but did in Ondi Timoner. Donald Clarke hears the trials and tribulations of one long-sufering director.

ANTON NEWCOMBE, the narcissistic, borderline delusional leader of Californian rock preservationists The Brian Jonestown Massacre, believes himself to be spearheading an artistic insurgency.

"We've got a full-scale revolution going on," Newcombe announces towards the beginning of Ondi Timoner's superb documentary, Dig! Really? The BJM produce excellent records - jangly, drony things with entertainingly morose lyrics - but reviving the 1960s revival that the Jesus and Mary Chain launched 20 years ago hardly constitutes a storming of the citadel.

"I think that may be right," Timoner, a chatty 30-year-old, agrees. "You look at his lyrics and there is no revolution in there. He is desperate to fight against something. But, you know, this is as close to revolution as our generation gets. We missed the 1960s and we know it. But you can't reinvent the wheel. You have to just shuffle the elements and try hard to make it fresh."

So why should we bother with Dig!? Doesn't this study of the poisonous rivalry between the barely famous Brian Jonestown Massacre and the popular - though no more musically radical - Dandy Warhols really belong on MTV? The main selling point is Anton himself. A supernaturally unhinged beanpole, whose unpredictable rages are directed against band members, fans and journalists alike, Newcombe is never less than compelling to watch.

Timoner first met the self-proclaimed genius in 1996 while developing a TV series following the fortunes of 10 promising unsigned bands. The buzz around The Brian Jonestown Massacre was already deafening and the director, a Yale graduate, who once had ambitions to be a rock star herself, was eager to film an LA gig specifically arranged to showcase the band before music executives.

Displaying a tendency towards self-immolation that would grow stronger over the years, Newcombe somehow found himself brawling with lead guitarist Matt Hollywood. The gig degenerated into chaos and the band left the Viper Rooms without a contract.

Somehow or other the fiasco cemented the relationship between Timoner and her subject. Newcombe explained that she should forget the other suckers and focus on the only two groups in America who mattered: The Brian Jonestown Massacre and a gang of unknowns called The Dandy Warhols.

"He made it clear he was going to take over the film," she says. "You have to understand that, at this stage, the Dandies and Brian Jonestown worshipped one another. But then shortly after that they stopped loving one another."

This is half true. Courtney Taylor, the savvy leader of The Dandy Warhols who also narrates Dig!, remains touchingly loyal to his old friend throughout. While Newcombe badmouths the increasingly popular power-pop band - even cutting a tune called Not If You Were the Last Dandy on Earth - Taylor continues to praise Newcombe as the most exciting musician in the country.

"But you will notice that they don't share the frame together much after the first 15 minutes of the film," Timoner says. "The truth is that Courtney wanted a degree of stability in his life. He wanted to have fun, but didn't want chaos."

While Newcombe's fantastically prolific band remained mired in cultdom, The Dandy Warhols gained the attention that would culminate with their worldwide 2000 hit Bohemian Like You. Considering that that song became known through a Vodafone commercial, it's no surprise that Newcombe decided that his former friends were selling out.

"I started out doing this project because I was interested in that point where art meets commerce," Timoner explains. "I couldn't believe it when I met The Brian Jonestown Massacre. It woke me up to the fact that so many other bands had just become businessmen. Other bands who had spent years desperately trying to make it would conform. The Brian Jonestown really didn't seem to care. They had no interest in that middle-class lifestyle."

So, is it possible to gain success in the music industry while retaining your integrity? "I think so. I think Courtney really has some integrity. I really do. He openly expresses his disgust with his record label. He believes very strongly that he is the letter writer and they are the postman. But he is a good businessman."

It is, nonetheless, clear that Timoner finds the BJM a more fascinating act than the Dandies. A one-man band with a thousand members, the BJM, though less challenging musically, have something of The Fall about them. The Manchester band, whose personnel undergoes a radical rearrangement every few minutes, retains its character because it is really just the physical manifestation of Mark E Smith's peculiar imagination.

"Anton has had 50 to 100 members in his band," Timoner agrees. "I had to focus on one line-up because I couldn't demand that an audience take that all in. The band is a boot camp of rock. Musicians decide they can't stand it and then leave. But they have gone on and formed other bands. Peter Haynes of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club was a member. One of many."

If the forgiveness of the wronged is any measure of genius, then Newcombe, whose crimes against Timoner and Taylor are beyond number, surely deserves to be in the running for the Nobel Prize of Rock. Over the seven years that it took to make Dig!, the young director was rendered broke, homeless and pregnant (not by Newcombe, it should be clarified). The end result was 1,500 hours of footage.

"Originally I had a five-hour cut and I thought there was nothing I could cut out of it," she says wearily. "I cried a lot. I was so tired being pregnant and it was so hot in my non-air conditioned place, it was really awful. My head would just hit the keyboard, it was so hot. It was literally hell trying to edit this film. This film has nearly killed everyone involved with it."

Eventually Timoner had a serviceable cut ready for the 2004 Sundance Film Festival - where, to her great surprise, it won the event's Grand Jury Prize. Sales of The Brian Jonestown Massacre's numerous independently released records boomed, but Newcombe, predictably antagonistic and ungrateful, has badmouthed Timoner to everyone who'll listen.

"I was shocked and let down," he whinged on his website. "Several years of our hard work was reduced at best to a series of punch-ups and mishaps taken out of context, and at worst bold faced lies and misrepresentation of fact." Elsewhere he complains that Timoner stopped filming his band in 1998, just as the Dandies were becoming successful.

The director sighs.

"Complete and utter bullshit. Think about those later scenes in the film; he has greying hair and sideburns. If I stopped filming in 1998 I would have had to do hair and make-up. Truth doesn't enter into these accusations. The last interview was June 2003 and the last performance footage was August 2003."

But the most significant falling out involved a hilarious incident, which began with the band being stopped by police officers while touring Georgia. In Dig! we watch aghast as Newcombe practically invites the cops to search the convoy and - surprise, surprise - a marijuana joint is discovered.

"The joint had been given to me by somebody in the music industry and he had forgotten that I had it," Timoner says in a tone of exasperation. "He waived his rights and allowed them to search the car because he is just the most paranoid guy on the planet. Suddenly it's my fault, though I cannot tell you the number of times he has smoked pot with me. So then he starts trying to communicate with the cops using secret Masonic signals. Incredible."

Having spent seven years working on a project she felt would only play on rock group's tour buses, Ondi Timoner, yet another beneficiary of the current documentary boom, finds herself a sought after film-maker. At the moment she is working on a history of reggae with Chris Blackwell, founder of Island records, and is being courted to direct a biopic of the country music star Glen Sherley. Meanwhile, the disputes with Anton Newcombe continue.

"I always felt that I was this guy's Leni Riefenstahl and that is what he planned for me," she laughs. "But I have become his Courtney Taylor now. I am now the person he has issues with. I am the person who brought him to the world; yet he didn't make this film himself and I think that troubles him."

Is she suggesting that Courtney and Anton are on better terms again? "Yes. They met up again after Anton finally saw the film. Here was Courtney saying Anton was such a better musician than he was. Anton thought: maybe I should stop saying that this guy is such a big sell-out and hang out with him again."

Who'd have thought a rock star would be so in thrall to ego?

Dig! opens on July 1st