Interview With Joshua Erkman, Writer And Director Of ‘A Desert’

A lot can happen out in the desert. It’s vast and open. It’s full of unseen things and uncertainty. It’s also rough and sweltering at times. There can be things out there that surprise you, too. Joshua Erkman’s feature film directorial debut, A Desert, is a lot of those things – gritty, dangerous, unexpected.

A photographer’s road trip takes a dark turn when he befriends a reckless couple, plunging him into a nightmarish neo-noir spiral of unpredictable horror.

To celebrate the release of the film, I chatted with Joshua about the inspiration behind the film, location scouting, casting, and more!

PopHorror: I really enjoyed A Desert so I’m super excited to talk to you about it today.

Joshua Erkman: Alright! Where are you located?

PopHorror: I’m in Arizona.

Joshua Erkman: Okay, so you know the energy of the desert.

PopHorror: I do! There was a lot of scenery that looked a lot like Arizona. I’m also familiar with driving to California and those roads where there’s nothing on either side of you. What sparked the idea for the film and how did this project come about?

Joshua Erkman: I had this idea for this photographer character that is a specific type of landscape photographer that shoots with a very specific type of 8×10 camera. I thought that would be an interesting character to explore. Wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen to them or what even the movie was going to be about, but what I set out to do was like, let me approach this a little bit differently than I had some other projects or other scripts that I’ve written. What I did is I went out and started making what their body of work would be. I would take these desert road trips, and I would photograph things as if I was that character and I started to amass this large collection of photographs that became the book that’s in the movie. What was happening as I was doing this is it was almost like location scouting because ideas would come like, well what if you went to this place? What would happen if this happened? I found this abandoned military base and I was like, what’s happening there? What if there’s people there? But then I came across a lot of abandoned movie theaters. I was doing this during Covid too, and so it was like shuttered movie theaters, abandoned movie theaters, old drive-ins. If you’ve got any familiarity with driving some of these roads, these two-lane highways in the desert, you see these billboards that are low to the ground. Sometimes they’re just blank and they make me think of movie screens. So, it was billboards, and movie screens, and all of this stuff, and this photographer going through this landscape in the desert. It all started to coalesce into ultimately what the movie is, and that’s where this started to become this dialogue about movies and how we make images, and our relationship with image making and how movies inform how we operate in the world.

PopHorror: So, you really kind of had the locations first and then built the story off of that. My next question was about the locations and how neat they were with the abandoned town with all of the graffiti and the abandoned movie theater, and I wanted to know what it was like location scouting for the film. It sounds like you already had them in mind and then built everything around what you had found.

Joshua Erkman: Yeah, I was discovering that. Some of them I was familiar with but some of them I was also discovering. I was just driving by and would be like, wait, that’s a sign for a pet cemetery? What’s going on there? I’d take a photograph as if I’m the photographer and not like a location scouting photo but very specifically framed, black and white. Then I’d drive away and be like, huh, what if we went and did this and what would happen there, and then this abandoned military base, which is a massive, sprawling thing. These roads that are painted a bazillion different ways and it’s crumbling. It’s crumbling because they don’t have enough money to properly destroy it all so they’re just letting the elements take over. I kind of liked that and that’s aspects of what the movie’s about too.

PopHorror: You mentioned the camera, the 8×10 camera that Alex uses. I noticed there’s a lot of old school media in the film such as the camera, the 8-tracks and just the entire pit that Renny is lying in, the cassette player they were using in the hotel room, and the tube TVs and that whole setup. Can you discuss the importance of these items? Because they were very prominent throughout the whole film.

Joshua Erkman: Makes me excited to hear that you picked up on what’s in Renny’s pit. 

PopHorror: I didn’t know what else to call it!

Joshua Erkman: Or grave, you know. Because the movie is trying to be in communication with movies and our personal relationship to movies and so much of that is about how we capture them or how we experience them and the media by which we’re interacting with. And the different ways they can function. For example, there’s a very specific choice of… Alex is a photographer with artistic goals. The private investigator is a photographer but his photographs function as forensic evidence. There is a pornographer and those function in a very specific way, and these are different ways that we can make and create images and how they all are feeding into each other. But then also just the history of that, like whether it’s a movie theater that people aren’t going to or it’s old media that we’re always dealing with the remnants of. Alex shoots on this film camera. Like you said, there’s cassette tapes in it. It’s like, the pornographer is making things on High 8 tape and he’s looking at things on whatever he can cobble together. It’s like the whole detritus of the media is in it. When we found that spot where Renny lays in, some of that was already there. One of the things that was there was an old camera. It was a 4×5 camera but it was very similar to Alex’s camera and it just felt very appropriate because I had found a location in my scouting. There was a photograph that I took of a pit that was full of flat screen TV boxes and just old TVs and junk like that. Again, it was like… I don’t know. It all kind of starts to be in communication with each other.

PopHorror: If it wasn’t for the cars that they drive like Alex’s car and the detective’s car, and the phones, you almost wouldn’t know what year this is taking place because of all of the old school things. Who listens to cassettes these days? I have all of my old ones, but do I have something to play them on? No. Could this be the 80s or 90s? Possibly. 

Joshua Erkman: If I could talk a little bit about that. I love that you’re feeling that there’s a timelessness, sort of like you’re not quite sure where it is. It’s obviously not set in the past. It’s maybe present day. One, I hate it when movies really date themselves with the technology. It somehow bumps you, but also there’s something that I was finding at places that’s like, you have this iconic movie idea of what a motel is. Like a motel in a movie looks one way. Well that motel doesn’t really exist anymore. It doesn’t exist. The structure might exist but it’s this weird amalgamation of what’s happened to it over time. Maybe it was built in the 60s and over time, the sink breaks so they’ve got to put a new faucet on it. Well, they’re not putting the faucet on it that was from the 1960s, they’re going to put the faucet on it that they could get at The Home Depot in 2000. Stuff starts to feel a little weird like that, where it’s like the sign is from the 60s. The motel sign, it’s kind of broken but it’s still there. There’s these remnants of the past and that was even in the exchange between the motel clerk and the private investigator. He was like, “Do you have his room key?” And it’s like, no, man, because it’s all key cards. I like that idea of we’re in this in between past and current times where technology is kind of shitty and it’s kind of a weird bad replacement for things that worked better, maybe.

PopHorror: Renny is a very intriguing character. I think that Zachary Ray Sherman nailed it. When he showed up, I was like, I can’t tell if I recognize him or if he just seems familiar. But then I realized it’s his voice and I realized he was Jasper in 90210. He looks nothing like he did on the show. He blew me away as Renny. It’s so different from what I’ve seen him in. What was casting him like?

Joshua Erkman: It’s funny because I was not familiar with him at all prior to casting him in the movie. Our amazing casting director, Gayle Pillsbury, sent me his audition tape and his reading of the character was different from everybody else I saw. I found it really unsettling. I just knew instantly that I had to talk to this guy. I talked to him and he’s just a total sweetheart and really got it. He had sent me some clips of other works that he’d been in because I’d only seen the audition tape. I was watching one of the clips that he sent me and I was like, I don’t understand why this guy sent me this clip, he’s not even in the movie. It took me a minute to realize that that’s him in the movie, he just put on like 70 pounds or something.

PopHorror: Wow!

Joshua Erkman: It was a very indie movie, and I was like, man, he brought that level of dedication to this movie to totally become this unrecognizable version of himself. I was like, man, I’ve got to get this guy in here, and he did similar things like growing out his facial hair. He lost weight for the movie. Even when we were out filming, I remember one morning we were out by the motel and I was driving with our editor to get coffee. It was really early and we’re driving down this road, and there’s this guy walking without his shirt on, off to the side of the highway. I was like, “Who is that guy?” and my editor was like, “Yeah, man, we should have got that guy in the movie. Oh wait, no, that’s Zack. He’s in the movie!” It was just like, oh who’s that creepy guy walking on the side of the road? We need to get him. Oh, he’s our creepy guy!

PopHorror: Just one last question for you today. What’s your favorite scary movie?

Joshua Erkman: Oh my god. There’s so many. I feel like my answer is going to be so lame. My favorite, favorite one? It’s going to be The Shining, but everybody says that, or a lot of people say that, but I just always come back to it. I love Psycho. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise. There’s so, so many. I love The Changeling. I love Rosemary’s Baby. I guess it’s going to be The Shining, which I’m sure that nine out of 10 people tell you.

Thank you so much to Joshua for taking the time to speak with us. A Desert is in theaters in NYC and LA today and will release nationwide later this month.