Interview with Eric Weeks

Synopsis of The Great Basin!: A film, book, and print project that addresses climate change, the severe drought in the Western United States, gun culture, the military’s use of the basin and range of Nevada for atomic testing, cultural stereotypes, the director’s own personal history, and his experiences in this mostly remote area. In the 15-minute short film, he creates complex collages of his still and motion captures made in Nevada with appropriated short clips from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, recent weather footage, The Lone Ranger, as well as John Wayne’s and other historic films, cartoons, and many other cultural artifacts, in order to speak to the place and its significance.

IAG: This film is very clearly tied to a specific place—the desert of Nevada. What inspired you to make a film about the Nevada desert?

EW: In early 2022, I was fortunate to receive a residency through the Montello Foundation (https://www.montellofoundation.org/) in Montello, Nevada. This unique residency is designed for one person to spend two weeks completely off of the grid in the basin and range of northeast Nevada. Pennsylvania College of Art & Design supported my travel there through a faculty grant, of which I am very grateful. Having made my earlier films in urban areas, I was interested to see what I could do in an unpopulated landscape. While there I captured moving and still images, and extensively researched about the area. Two out of the twenty-plus books that I read while there were instrumental in the conceptualization of my film The Great Basin! Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Desert. They were Rebecca Solnit’s Savage Dreams and John McPhee’s Basin and Range. While pondering the peaceful and contemplative environment, I realized how much of the human activity that has taken place in Nevada has affected my experience. Climate change, gun culture, atomic testing, cultural stereotypes, and my childhood resurfacing made me want to take all of these ideas and put it into a film. I understood that I couldn’t tell this story with my images of the basin and range alone, so I began to appropriate clips from classic films, TV commercials, cartoons, etc.

IAG: This film touched upon many themes that are only loosely connected. For example, climate change, water scarcity, gun culture, and how the media has historically portrayed Native Americans. Why tackle so many themes in one short film, and what strategy did you use to do it?

EW: My film does touch on several different themes. What connects them is the state of Nevada and my childhood experiences. Nevada has had a long history of European settlers abusing the land and people. Most considered it a wasteland, and that is why the US government conducted so many atomic tests there. Thoughts like: “Hardly anybody lives there”, “the land isn’t very valuable”, and “we can push indigenous peoples off the land in order to mine the natural resources”, all were short-minded, myopic ways of thinking about this beautiful sagebrush desert. 

The land was usurped from indigenous peoples to raise cattle. Farmers drain the ground water to grow water-thirsty crops like alfalfa, and miners pull silver and gold from the earth, so of course there is acute water scarcity in the Southwest of the United States at present. It wasn’t my goal to speak on all of these topics when I first started the film, but they kept coming up through my reading and through my own experience there. I made this film without a script, and without a specific agenda, and so it almost is like I made it through a fever dream. 

Much of the appropriated footage has a connection with my childhood and growing up in the 1970s, so the viewer sees images of Evel Knievel jumping buses on his motorcycle at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, Muhammed Ali, Elvis Presley. You see Westerns, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, Kubrick films, and racist Bugs Bunny cartoons that portray Native Americans poorly. These are all cultural media outputs that affected me and shaped me when I was growing up. When I started researching and traveling in Nevada, many of those topics came up that had lived in me latently from my past. What I really like about this film is that yes, there are many loosely connected themes, but they are connected through me. 

In this short fifteen-minute film there is an onrush of overlapping information and imagery. I use devices such as repetition and foreshadowing because I feel like it mimics how memory works.

IAG: I would describe the editing as extremely lively, playful, and ironic. First of all, what program did you use to edit it and how long did it take you? And is this a style you’ve used in other projects?

EW: I started gathering my first ideas, and eventually also film clips, in June 2022. I traveled to Nevada for the Montello Residency the last week of July through the first week of August. While editing in the Fall of 2022, I realized I needed to visit the southern part of Nevada, so I traveled there in January 2023, using Las Vegas as a base, but driving out of town every day in all directions. I visited the Hoover Dam, rented a small motor boat and puttered up and down the Colorado River, drove through the Valley of Fire, and visited old mining ghost towns in Amargosa Valley, to name a few locations. I finished editing the film in May 2023 using Adobe Premiere. The film took 11 months to complete.

This was the most enjoyable video editing process that I have experienced, and my first time using appropriated footage. I have always referenced other art in my work, but never directly. I hope to utilize appropriated footage in my new project, and to be able to incorporate some of what I learned while making The Great Basin!, but we will see if it is the right approach or not. 

IAG: What's your next project?

EW: I am starting work on a new short film. My little three-year-old Cockapoo is named Weegee, after the famous New York City crime photographer from the mid-twentieth century. Both the original Weegee and my Weegee are quirky characters! The original Weegee made a film titled Weegee’s New York in 1948. It is an 8-millimeter film that shows aspects of New York City in experimental ways. I plan to attach a video camera to my pup’s harness so he can show the world his unique perspective of New York. I will help him edit his footage with appropriated imagery, just like his Dear Old Dad’s work!

Separately, I am also writing short stories. After writing one for the book component of The Great Basin! Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Desert under a nom de plume, I realized that this is another medium with which I enjoy working. Stay tuned!

IAG: Last but not least, what are three films that have particularly inspired you?

EW: There are some fifty or so classic films that I own on DVD, and I have worn those discs thin! I love to watch great films over and over because they continue to unfold, and are like old friends. I have watched most of these over forty times each over the years. It is extremely difficult for me to choose just three influential films, but here we go:

• Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane is at the top of my list, specifically because of Greg Toland’s cinematographic innovations. He cut away flooring so the camera could be placed at ground level. He made his own lenses. He exposed film multiple times with different focus pulls, in order to have infinite depth-of-field at a time when film stock had a low sensitivity to light. He made a room’s ceiling out of canvas so he could hide microphones above while filming from below. His cinematic work was groundbreaking. 

• Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon is also at the top of my list. The inky black & white description throughout the film, the deluge of rain in the opening sequence, both are visually searingly stunning. What really resonates for me though is the narrative structure, now named the Rashomon effect, where the same story is told from different and conflicting perspectives. 

• Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas is an epic narrative with many cinematic effects like long tracking shots, focus and focal length pulls while shooting, and an unrivaled soundtrack that creates meaning. His cinematographer Micheal Ballhaus deserves a lot of credit as well. I have probably watched Goodfellas more than any other film in my life.