Digging for Fire (2015) on Netflix
Lee and Tim house-sit a Hollywood Hills home with their son Jude. In the yard Tim finds a gun and a bone and wants to dig. Lee wants the taxes done first.
- Netflix2.5/5
- IMDb5.8/107,216 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes64%
Trailer
Plot summary
Tim and Lee, a gym teacher and a yoga instructor married to each other, bring their three-year-old son Jude along to house-sit a client's home in the Hollywood Hills. In the yard Tim turns up a gun and a bone and wonders what lies buried nearby. The police can act only if a body appears, and Lee asks him to let it go. She takes Jude to her mother's for the weekend so that Tim can finish the taxes he has put off. Tim fills the empty house with friends instead, and his story of the find gets some of them digging. Lee, who feels she has no identity beyond mother and wife, spends the day with her sister Squiggy and Squiggy's husband Bob.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Digging for Fire (2015)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Digging for Fire was based on a real incident: Jake Johnson and his wife dug up a bone and a gun in the garden of a rented house, and he and his friends dug up various objects over weeks before burying them again. He told Joe Swanberg the story three years later and they made a film of it.
- Swanberg and Jake Johnson wrote a two-and-a-half-page outline with no dialogue or character descriptions and let the actors improvise: Orlando Bloom decided his character would ride a motorcycle, Chris Messina suggested his go swimming naked, and Brie Larson argued her character was not attracted to Tim.
- Swanberg and cinematographer Ben Richardson shot on 35 mm film rather than digitally, unlike most of Swanberg's earlier films; because shooting on film limited the takes, the cast rehearsed each improvised scene in advance so it could be blocked out.
- Swanberg dedicated the film to Paul Mazursky, who died in 2014, citing Mazursky's influence on his work and the thematic similarities between Digging for Fire and Mazursky's 1969 film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
