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Searching for a Trace
By Jason Wulfsohn, director of Tracing Cowboys
(special feature from 2008 AFI Dallas International Film Festival)
As a graduate film student at USC, I studied with Nina Menkes, an acclaimed filmmaker known for her experimental approach to cinema. She spoke of the need to view filmmaking as a journey. That if you kept searching for what was true in a story, you would eventually find it, even if it lead you somewhere you did not realize you were going when you started. In retrospect, this was our experience in making Tracing Cowboys, an independent feature that I directed and that will receive its world premier at the 2008 AFI Dallas International Film Festival.
When we began, we did know that the film would be about two peoples' search for their own identity whilst leading lives apart from one another. We also knew it would be a story about self-deception as well as self-discovery, about honesty but also betrayal of yourself and others. And we knew that the two principal characters would be Ethan, a young Englishman obsessed with his hero John Wayne and intent on becoming a Country & Western singer; and his American girlfriend, Debi, a photographer who, toward the start of the film, leaves without explanation, compelling Ethan to travel down to Mexico during the Day of the Dead festival in search of her. The only map Ethan has to guide him is that contained within photographs Debi has taken during her journey, a visual trail that eventually points Ethan toward the film's conclusion.
For us as filmmakers, in a way similar to Ethan's own journey, there was much about the film that we did not yet know when we started. We decided, for example, to use locations just as we found them, and we almost always included in the scene those people whom we found there as well. In this way, the film became an improvised interaction between professional actors portraying the two leads and a supporting cast that was almost entirely non-professional - real people playing themselves.
This was especially true for the roles of the husband-and-wife couple who run the remote Mexican hotel to which Debi travels, and to where Ethan eventually follows her. My partner in the making of the film was Sacha Grunpeter, who plays Ethan and also wrote the screenplay (and with whom I co-produced the film), and for these two roles he and I had originally cast two prominent L.A.-based Hispanic actors. When we came to shoot, last-minute scheduling issues prevented both from being able to travel to our very inaccessible location in Baja. Instead, in keeping with our philosophy, we cast the actual husband-and-wife couple working at the hotel where we were shooting, neither of whom spoke a word of English and neither of whom had ever been on or near a film set. Despite some initial apprehension, it was apparent, within moments of shooting their first scene, that the decision was correct. Each brought a truthfulness and depth to their role that I could not have previously hoped for from professionals.
This ongoing process of discovery was also true in the relationship of our film to another film - John Ford's The Searchers, a classic repeatedly referenced in Tracing Cowboys - and to John Wayne himself.
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Many scenes in our own film take place in a small village, informally named Papa Fernandez after a legendary local fisherman. While shooting, Sacha noticed in one of the homes a faded black-and-white photograph from the 1950s of Papa Fernandez standing alongside none other than John Wayne. Both are holding a prize-sized marlin, freshly caught in the nearby Sea of Cortez. Local lore has it that John Wayne, after shooting some of his Westerns in the same area, would occasionally visit to fish with Papa Fernandez. Years later, when Papa Fernandez was struggling to make payments on his small plot of land, John Wayne's business manager suggested to his client that he buy the land as a base for future fishing expeditions. Firing his business manager in disgust, John Wayne promptly bought the land himself, giving it entirely to Papa Fernandez.
Papa Fernandez passed away at the age of 102, several years before the making of Tracing Cowboys, but the villagers are his direct descendants and include many of our "actors," and Veronica, the little girl in the film, is Papa Fernandez's great-granddaughter. Those of us who made Tracing Cowboys like to think that the story of this land, owned at one time by John Wayne, represents a profound and even mysterious affirmation of our belief in the relationship between the imagined life of a film and the real lives that we passed through in its making.
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| Tracing Cowboys makes its World Premiere at the 2008 AFI Dallas Film Festival!! The film screens in the Target 10 Narrative Feature Competition on Saturday, March 29th and Monday, March 31st, 2008! Screening Info:
Saturday, March 29 at 4:30 p.m.
Angelika Film Center
Theatre 6
5321 E. Mockingbird Lane, Dallas, Texas Monday, March 31 at 4:00 p.m.
Landmark's Magnolia
Theatre 3
3699 McKinney Avenue, Dallas, Texas Tuesday, April 1 at 10:00 p.m.
Angelika
Theatre 7
5321 E. Mockingbird Lane, Dallas, Texas For more information, please check out www.tracingcowboys.com |
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