Disclaimer: that’s probably not Eric Harris in that photo. It’s just a still from the movie
In true Elephant 6 fashion Eric Harris wears a lot of hats in his musical career. He’s drummed in the Olivia Tremor Control, Circulatory System, played with Elf Power and now has co-directed the new E6-packed film “Major Organ and the Adding Machine.” Somewhat incredibly, it winds up being a fun, weird kids movie instead of the bizarre art film we all expected.
MP3: Major Organ and the Adding Machine - His Mister’s Pet Whistles
Eric was nice enough to chat with me about all his projects, including what’s going on with the Olivia Tremor Control. He’s got a new movie, new album (the Circulatory System’s Signal Morning) and new OTC material on the way and was good enough to talk at length about all of it. Read on!
You Ain’t No Picasso interviews Eric Harris
Matt: As far as Major Organ goes, when did the initial filming and initial recording start with that?
Eric: Back in the late 90’s we poked around with it quite a bit. Me and Joey Foreman. But we just didn’t have the technology, quite honestly, back then. The things we wanted to do were not available—it didn’t happen to work back then. So we poked around with MIDI and we recorded a bunch of music and it just never happened until we got Final Cut Pro on his computer. And then it was like “Hey let’s make a movie.” He’s always been a great filmmaker. And we just moved into the digital age and all the sudden everything seemed possible.
Matt: I read that you all started recording in a couple different formats like beta max…
Eric: Yeah, well we had high aims—we had beta max, he had an old Amiga that could do basic video stuff. It was all dinosaur technology. And we kept flip-flopping on the formats, it just wasn’t working out.
Matt: Were you able to use any of the stuff that you recorded before the digital switch over?
Eric: No, we didn’t use any of it. But it was sort of the inspiration to get started again. I mean it was sort of like a great unfinished project, you know.
Matt: I read, on the Cloud website, where you said the initial spirit was ‘just keep filming.’ Was that what it was like the second time around or by the time you made the digital switch did you sort of know, “Ok, this is gonna be the loose plot of the film” ?
Eric: Well really what’s kinda funny about it is the plot sort of emerged organically. Which was more than we could have hoped for. By the time we got the Fernandez kids involved it was kinda going into place like, “oh, now I understand what the plot of this is.” It really kinda occurred to us in a backwards way like that. But we still wanted to leave enough open-ended. We didn’t want people to get an easy conclusion out of the movie, and we wanted it to be for kids too. We wanted the kids to think about it and say “what was that all about?” And we wanted to make something intriguing. It kinda morphed into a children’s movie. It really is, seriously a children’s movie.
Matt: I remember when I was watching it I was very surprised because I expected, based on how weird the album is, “ok, this is gonna be maybe a little difficult to swallow.” But I could totally have seen myself watching it whenever I was 8 or 10 or so and just loving it.
Eric: Yeah. When Karen and Sophie started filming with us they were seven and five. And they just immediately understood what was going on. They just thought it was great fun. And that’s sort of the theme of the movie—these kids are having a grand time throughout the movie while all these other characters around them kinda do their thing. And if you ask them what they think it means, they’ve already got it without thinking about it. So I think we hit it on that hopefully. I hope kids will react to it just as a really fun movie and then maybe they’ll walk away thinking about it a little bit. “Well what was that character doing?” That’s kinda what were going for. We did organize it, we did re-do all of the surreal. I didn’t want to make a surreal art movie that was just…boring. It’s the look of the Armet line. Hopefully it’s surreal enough that it’s intriguing, but not so surreal that it’s only entertaining to stoned people.
Matt: Are those John’s kids or niece and nephew?
Eric: Yeah, those are his kids.
Matt: Ok, very cool. I didn’t know if he had kids until I had read that they were related.
Eric: Those are two of his three children. And they’re awesome. They’re fantastic kids. They were really good sports. It was difficult to motivate Kira at five years old sometimes, you know because when you’re five years old you do something for an hour and then you say, “Well I want to do something else now” and we just finished setting up. Its like, “No, you have to be here for another four or five hours.” It was hard to get her motivated sometimes. But you couldn’t get mad at them because it’s a five year old kid. But he really, really wants to be an actor and he seems to have known this for a long time so I would just kinda of remind him of that and say, “you want to be an actor, you want to write plays and movies. This is what it is. This is unfortunately the reality of what you do when you make a movie. And he’d kinda get it sometimes and go, “Okay.” But when he was on, he was just wonderful. But you had to remember not to get mad at them. Sometimes these shots would take hours to set up or even longer and they’d be sitting around waiting for it to be over. And then you’d say “ok its finally time to do the scene.”
Matt: Have you all explained to him how many thousands of people have already seen the movie and its not even out yet?
Eric: We did a trial run of the movie in Athens, back six months ago or so. And it was completely sold out. We had then get up and take bows. They were really excited. I mean, I can’t imagine what school was like for them the next day. They were rock stars. I mean they were really rock stars. And they must have felt really good about it, I hope. I hope, and not completely mortified and embarrassed because they’re a couple of years older now and you know how that is for kids, to look at something you did two years ago and it seems like another lifetime. Like you’re going from the age seven to the age nine. But I think they’re proud of it. I hope they are anyway. We had them do the commentary track on the DVD too, so you get their insights.
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