Digging for Fire

''Digging for Fire'' is a 2015 American comedy-drama film directed by Joe Swanberg and co-written by Swanberg and Jake Johnson. It stars an ensemble cast led by Johnson, Rosemarie DeWitt, Brie Larson, Sam Rockwell, Anna Kendrick, Orlando Bloom and Mike Birbiglia. Johnson and DeWitt play a married couple who find a gun and a bone in the backyard of a house they are staying in.

The film's plot was inspired by a similar incident in which Johnson discovered a gun and a bone in his backyard. Instead of a traditional script, he and Swanberg wrote an outline that summarized the plot but included no dialogue. They cast the film mainly by contacting their friends and other actors who they knew had enjoyed their previous work. It was filmed over 15 days in Los Angeles County, California. Swanberg dedicated the film to filmmaker Paul Mazursky.

''Digging for Fire'' premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival on January 26, 2015. It was released in theaters on August 21, 2015 by The Orchard and on video on demand on August 25, 2015. The film was generally well received by critics.

Plot

Lee, a yoga instructor, brings her husband Tim, a gym teacher, and their 3-year-old son Jude to house-sit in a client's house for a few weeks while the client is away. While walking around the property, Tim finds a gun and a bone in the backyard. At first he wants to dig up the surrounding ground to see if a body is buried there, but Lee convinces him it is a bad idea.

When Lee and Jude leave for the weekend to stay with her parents so that Tim can work without distraction on the family's taxes, he invites a group of friends—including Ray, Phil, Adam, and Paul—to the house for the night. After a few drinks, they decide to dig up the backyard together, quickly finding another bone and a license plate. Phil, who is skeptical about the digging, leaves with Adam and Paul as Tim's friend Billy and call girls Alicia and Max arrive at the house. Billy pairs off with Alicia and Ray with Max while Tim continues to dig. He finds a shoe before deciding to go to sleep.

The next morning, Tim is visited by a neighbor who warns him that digging for buried items in the backyard is a bad idea and says that the site was once the "Chicano Hall of Fame". Soon afterwards, Max returns to pick up her purse and finds Tim digging again. She joins him and discovers a plastic bag filled with bones. Meanwhile, Lee goes to visit her sister Squiggy and brother-in-law Bob for an afternoon after complaining to her mother that she no longer feels she has an identity outside of being a mother and wife.

Phil returns to the house and, seeing Tim with Max, assumes that Tim is cheating on Lee. Tim and Max go out to dinner and Tim confesses that he feels his marriage to Lee has deteriorated since they had a child. Lee goes to a bar alone, where she meets Ben. When Ben is punched by another man at the bar, she accompanies him to visit Alicia, who is a medical student and a friend of his, so that Alicia can suture his wound. As Tim and Max smoke marijuana together at the house, Ben cooks dinner for Lee.

Max leaves the house when Ray reappears and Tim accuses Ray of ruining his night. Lee and Ben make their way to the beach and share a kiss. Tim returns to the backyard and uncovers a ring and what appears to be a human hand before he decides to stop digging. He throws everything he has found back into the hole he has dug before starting to fill it in. He walks back up to the house and, finding Lee waiting for him, kisses her. The next morning, they pack up their belongings and go to pick up Jude.

Cast

*Jake Johnson as Tim
*Rosemarie DeWitt as Lee
*Brie Larson as Max
*Sam Rockwell as Ray
* Anna Kendrick as Alicia
*Orlando Bloom as Ben
*Mike Birbiglia as Phil
*Kent Osborne as Adam
*Sam Elliott as Pop Pop
*Judith Light as Grandma
*Ron Livingston as Bob
*Melanie Lynskey as Squiggy
*Jenny Slate as Yoga Couple
*Timothy Simons as Yoga Couple
* Jane Adams as Woman on beach
*Chris Messina as Billy T
*Steve Berg as Paul
*Lindsay Burdge as Lucy

Production

''Digging for Fire'' was based on a real incident in which Jake Johnson and his wife dug up a bone and a gun in the garden of a house they had rented. Over a couple of weeks, he and a group of his friends dug up various objects before deciding to bury them again. Johnson described the experience to Joe Swanberg about three years later and they decided to make a film about it. They wrote a two-and-a-half–page outline that summarized the plot but included no dialogue or detailed character descriptions. Swanberg wanted the actors to improvise the details of each scene and allowed them to make choices about their characters: for instance, Orlando Bloom decided that his character would ride a motorcycle, Chris Messina suggested that his character go swimming naked, and Brie Larson persuaded Johnson and Swanberg that her character would not be sexually attracted to Tim.

''Digging for Fire'' features an ensemble cast, the largest Swanberg had worked with at the time. He and Johnson cast the film by contacting friends and other actors who they knew had enjoyed their previous film together, ''Drinking Buddies''. Rosemarie DeWitt and Swanberg decided to work together after her husband, Ron Livingston, starred in ''Drinking Buddies''. Unlike the other actors, Orlando Bloom was cast through an agent. Swanberg cast his own son, Jude, as the three-year-old son of the lead characters.

The film was shot over 15 days in Los Angeles and Malibu, California. Swanberg and cinematographer Ben Richardson decided to shoot on 35 mm film rather tha