The Circuit

by Joe Leydon
Jason Wulfsohn arrived at the AFI Dallas festival as a man on two missions. The British-born filmmaker was on hand to host world premiere screenings of "Tracing Cowboys," an impressionistic drama about a would-be country singer who goes looking for his missing girlfriend, and winds up finding himself. Just as important - indeed, in Wulfsohn's view, maybe more important - he wanted to celebrate the all-too-short life of his lead actor, Sacha Grunpeter (pictured below), a dear friend and close collaborator who died in an auto mishap on the final day of filming.

"He was driving to my house, actually," Wulfsohn (pictured) wistfully recalled. "He and I were going to go out to Ventura County, to shoot the scene where Ethan, his character, dives into the sea. He'd been restoring a vintage Land Cruiser, and there was a mechanical fault with restoring the vehicle. And he was in an accident in Hancock Park that ultimately proved to be fatal.

 "The terrible irony is, when Ethan plunges into the sea, he sort of dies at that moment. But then he resurfaces, and is reborn - because he's shed all these affectations that he had, and discovered the true person that he is underneath. And the very time we were going to shoot the scene later that day, I believe, is the time Sacha finally passed away in the hospital."

Wulfsohn (pictured right) and Grunpeter  met while undergraduates at Cambridge University, when the budding actor appeared in one of the film student's short films, and they occasionally collaborated as scriptwriters over the next decade. "Tracing Cowboys" is a work of fiction, Wulfsohn said, but it was inspired in part by the real-life experiences of a musician Grunpeter knew.

"The guy was in a very tortured relationship with a girl," Wulfsohn said, "and she became pregnant. And so she left -- just disappeared - and he had no idea where she went. Months later, he found that something terrible had befallen her in Mexico. He tried to trace her journey, and find out the details of what had actually occurred. And he was tormented by the thought that, had she not left, or had he accompanied her, things might have been different."

With that tragedy as their jumping-off point, Wulfsohn and Grunpeter imagined a free-form scenario about Ethan, a "wanna-be cowboy" who lands work at a California ranch, even though "he's extremely ill-suited to do anything that traditional cowboys do." He's not much better as a singer - but just charming enough to capture the fancy of Debbie (Megan Edwards), an amateur photographer who, unfortunately, also has developed a few other amorous attachments.

After they quarrel, Debbie flees to Mexico. But when Ethan receives some of her photos in the mail, he's moved to pursue her - just like another Ethan hunted for another Debbie in his favorite movie, John Ford's "The Searchers." (Aptly chosen excerpts from Ford's classic are fleetingly glimpsed early in "Tracing Cowboys.")

At the time of Grunpeter's death, Wulfsohn said, "We'd already discussed filming various pick-up scenes that we thought would be necessary to complete the film. And, obviously, those were impossible to shoot. So I ended up doing minimal work with a double - and, of course, not being able to show the face, this was very limited.

"We'd also discussed that a voiceover would be necessary. And, of course, that became impossible, too. So the voiceover that we did use - which was going to be a lot more extensive than it is now - is voiced by a character who's no longer alive. Which was an odd choice, I admit. We're certainly not the first people to do it that way. But it wasn't our original intention for the film to be voiced by a character who's no longer alive. And who you don't know is no longer alive until the end of the movie."

AFI Dallas fest audiences seemed to respond warmly to "Tracing Cowboys." And there were a few notably damp eyes in the house when Wulfsohn introduced Grunpeter's proud parents - and Michael Grunpeter, Sacha's brother, who dubbed some of his late sibling's dialogue - during a Q&A session.

"I do like to think that the film we finished is very true to the film we started out to make," Wulfsohn said. When pressed on the subject, though, he admitted that he had additional incentives to complete the project.

"The film ends in Mexico during the celebration of the Day of the Dead, which, as we understood it, is essentially a holiday when you're able to spend time with the souls of those who are no longer here.

"Well, the act of completing this film has given me an opportunity to find a way to sustain my friendship with Sacha - to spend more time with him - even while he hasn't been here."

Editor's Note: "Tracing Cowboys" won the AFI Dallas HDNET Award Sunday night.