From a lone photographer capturing desert stone formations to abandoned cinemas that lies unexpected evil, Joshua Erkman’s directorial debut “A fate“Is consistently busy with pictures and the people who devote their lives to making them. A nightly road trip film that carries theirs Hitchcock effect On the sleeve, the film follows once acclaimed photographer (Kai Lennox) who tries to make a spark of creativity by driving through the American southwest without a mobile phone to comb through the landscape that used to inspire him so much.
The film, which premiered at Tribeca 2024 and opens in theaters this weekend, feels like the launch of a promising new genre filmmaker. Erkman’s path to his director’s debut was long, as he spent much of his previous career working with restorations of classic films. The director explained that this project was a direct result of a life that has given him endless amounts of time to spend studies of the cinema in the cinema.
“I like to think about it as this neo-Noir that is as much about films and the image craft as everything that happens in the film,” Erkman said during a new interview with Indiewire.
After attending USC Film School, Erkman’s career began in the quality control department in a DVD company, where he would spend eight hours a day watching the same films on a loop in search of the production of deficiencies.
“Like a cinephile, to watch the same movies over and over again you see things that you didn’t notice before,” he said. “You look at it not only as a viewer, but through the lens to“ What is technically wrong with it? “It only favored this movie obsession I had.”
From there, Erkman ended up in the niche field for film recovery, and worked with such as criteria, arrow and vinegar syndrome to restore negatives by classic films such as William Friedkin’s “Magician” for new physical editions. It is a field that has forced him to study the cinema’s masterpiece at the skeleton level, which gives him a unique perspective on how to structure films.
“Part of the work in mastery and restoration that I have done over the years, so much of it is about detail,” he said. “Especially with some of the films’ mechanics. You see the same thing over and over and over again, and you start subtracting” how is this functioning story or emotionally? “And it just gets” it’s this shot or that’s the shot. “And it’s something very interesting when you start deconstructing a movie.
Erkman has directed music videos and short films for several years, but “A Desert” marked its first step in feature film creation. He initially had the idea of making a movie about a photographer crossing the US deserts on his own, but did not have a specific story in mind. Instead, he spent several years developing what became Lennox’s character by producing a massive photo album. Erkman would spend his weekends driving through the desert baking roads in search of interesting landscapes and slowly gravitated against the types of landmarks he imagined would interest that a photographer who went through a mid -life crisis. These units eventually led him to discover the point of contact in his film: abandoned cinemas that are home to passion and evil in equal measures.
“I thought,” just let me start building this guy working, “he said.” Let me be this character, let me find these places and who informed what the script eventually became. I continued to encounter these old cinemas, abandoned cinemas, drive-in cinemas. It just made me think “maybe there is something here.”
“A desert” is both a compelling horror film and a reference -filled tribute to classic film. It is likely to appeal to both genre fanatics and noir historians to the same extent. In many ways, the film that Erkman made a direct result of his background in film recovery, both in terms of his main person’s obsession with photography and the craft that he learned when he spent endless hours and looked at old 35 mm print. He explained that watching pictures from classic films in different stages of completion gave him a bird’s perspective on the process that left him uniquely prepared to control his own work.
“There is a project recently that I worked with. It’s one of my favorite movies, I’ve seen it a lot of times,” he said. “And I sat there with the Colorist, and he said” damn, this is really complicated. “I was like,” What do you mean? “He said,” There are very few repeated pictures in this movie. “One way you would cover a conversation between people would have shot-inverted shots.
He continued, “things like that, where you are,” I’ve seen this movie a billion times, I know it inside and out. “Or I thought I did.
A dark sky edition, “a desert” now plays in selected theaters.
