“Feast Of Friends was supposed to be a full-length movie but we got bored and never finished it,” Doors guitarist Robby Krieger says with a laugh about the first and only film produced by The Doors about The Doors. Originally filmed in 1968 during the group’s summer tour, Feast Of Friends was intended to fall somewhere between a concert film and an art project—or as bandleader Jim Morrison said, “a fictional documentary.” However, the singer’s legal issues after exposing himself in Miami delayed the film’s official release until this fall, when a refreshed version finally saw the light of day on DVD. Souped-up with bonus footage, the 1968 documentary The Doors Are Open and other goodies, Feast Of Friends is the most honest look at the band—particularly Morrison—in their prime. “We’ve used little bits and pieces of it in various videos over the years, but we got a lot of requests to see the whole movie in one piece. So we decided to get all the outtakes together and see how much stuff we have,” says Krieger, who is prepping for some dates with his current project, Jam Kitchen. “The editors came up with some cool extras—they used some of the songs from Soft Parade and put them to the outtakes.”

Especially for the 1960s, Feast Of Friends was a unique peek behind the scenes into The Doors’ inner sanctum. What was the band’s original idea for the project?

The idea was to do cinema verité. Jim and Ray [Manzarek] were both in film school at UCLA so they were film buffs. They used to go to these midnight showings where they played weird movies in LA back in the day, so the idea was for the film to be less set up and more realistic. We had our buddies from the film school follow us around with cameras and see what came out. They were friends of ours, so you could almost forget that they were there. As Jim liked to say, “We’re not making the movie, the movie is making the movie.” It was making itself.

One thing I really like about this film is that people who have only seen the Oliver Stone movie [1991’s The Doors] with the “crazy” Jim can get a little bit of a different slant on who he was. He was a real person, too—maybe not all the time, but at least some of the time. [Laughs.]

How involved were you and the other members of The Doors in signing off on the final version of the film released this past fall?

We weren’t there in the editing room all the time, but they ran all of the ideas by us before they put them together. About 40 minutes of the film was already there, so the question was where to put the outtakes and how to make it a good package.

The black-and-white footage [included on the DVD] is the best live stuff ever filmed of us. The quality is professional. Usually, you tend to be a little self-conscious when somebody is taking pictures or filming you. But I think we were so spaced-out because we had just gotten over to England—between the time change and the fact that we didn’t go on until 3 or 4 a.m. We had to go after the Jefferson Airplane, and those guys just kept playing forever. [Laughs.]

This past summer, you took part in the annual Bonnaroo SuperJam where you played with Skrillex, Damian Marley, Big Gigantic and musicians across the festival’s stylistic spectrum. What were your thoughts on that experience?

I’d never been to Bonnaroo before and I was amazed at how well it was run. The only problem was that by the time I got onstage, it was about 3 a.m. [Laughs.] But it was cool because I got to go over and see Jack White. I never thought of Skrillex as a jammer, but he knows his way around a guitar and orchestrated the whole jam with Damian Marley and Cage The Elephant’s Matt Shultz. The three of us—Ray, John [Densmore] and I—did a song called “Breakn’ A Sweat” with Skrillex [in 2012]. I’m not much of an electronic guy, but I’m getting more into it. Ray and I went into the studio with him and he made these cool beats up on his laptop. What we played that day didn’t really sound much like what came out after he mixed it, but it was still cool. Personally, I think digital recording is bad news. It’s gonna destroy people’s brains, if it hasn’t already, so I’m building a new studio here in LA and it’s all analog. Skrillex is different, though—he was a guitar player in a real band before that, so that’s why he’s made it so big. I’ve played with Widespread Panic once or twice, and I did a few shows where we did Doors music with Gov’t Mule. I like playing with guys who can play their instruments.