San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
The cowboy way
Documentary from Houston filmmaker explores life on the range in Texas, Mexico, Montana and Argentina
As a boy growing up in the Clear Lake area, Gastón Davis had another life that he looked forward to every summer. His grandfather owned a ranch between the central Texas towns of Menard and Brady, right off U.S. 190, and introduced him to ranch life.
As a boy growing up in the Clear Lake area, Gastón Davis had another life that he looked forward to every summer. His grandfather owned the Pecan Spring Ranch between the Central Texas towns of Menard and Brady, right off U.S. 190, and introduced him to ranch life.
“I would learn from him,” says Davis, noting the family has owned a ranch in the area since the 1880s, “and work with cattle, goats, sheep and repair fences. So it’s always been in my blood, working in the agriculture industry, but I was never living it day to day, my whole life. … Hearing his stories of cowboys back in the olden days. He would work on horseback all day. … These days, you don’t work cows as much on horseback in a lot of these ranches. A lot of it is done in the back of a pickup. So, I was like, man, that’s really cool.
That really excites me.”
Now, Davis, 28, has found a way to bring together those two sides of his upbringing — the suburban kid who became a film student at University of Texas Austin and the ranch hand helping out his granddad — with “Cowboys Without Borders” (available Tuesday on Amazon, Apple TV, iTunes and other streaming services), his debut film and a lovingly-shot documentary chronicling the rigors of ranch life in four different regions across two continents: Texas, Mexico, Montana and Argentina.
Though his current day job has nothing to do with the cowboy way or film — Davis sells steel roofing materials in North Texas — he had long wanted to celebrate the modern-day cowboy but not just those in the U.S., an approach sparked by a trip to South America years before.
“My dad, when he was 17, moved to Chile. He hopped on a barge ship and went down there, lived with the captain of the ship’s family for four months and learned Spanish,” Davis says. “So, right after college, I hopped on a plane.”
But instead of living with a ship’s captain, Davis ended up as a vagabond vaquero, helping out on ranches in Argentina, Paraguay, Chile and Uruguay.
“I realized that there are not just cowboys in Texas,” he says. “They’re not just in Montana. They’re in Mexico. They’re in Argentina, Paraguay. They’re everywhere. And there’s a universal language. And that was something that I just realized what a story to tell. Not everyone gets to take the trip that I got to take, but I felt equipped to tell that story.”
‘A UFO hovering around’
But what he didn’t realize five years ago was just how long it would take to come together.
“I found myself in a situation where ignorance is bliss,” he explains. “I did not know what I was getting myself into. I thought it was going to take, maybe, a year to put together. But, boy, it took me 18 months just to edit the footage.”
Then there was the matter of financing. An Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign raised $8,000, says Davis, while the remainder of the $35,000 budget came from himself and family.
He chose his destinations through a matter of deliberation and luck.
“I knew we needed to go to Mexico because Mexico is where the Texas cowboy is inspired from. Because, as it explains in the film, as the cattle moved north, so did the vaqueros, and they taught the Texans how to manage and handle cattle. So, if you’re going to talk about the cowboy, you have to talk about the vaquero, and you have to go to Mexico.”
As for Montana, that came through a tip from his then-job at the Texas Department of Agriculture.
“The agriculture commissioner of Wyoming, Jason Fearneyhough, we built a good relationship and I told him what I was doing. And he said, ‘You need to go to Montana.
You need to work with Richard Roth at the IX Ranch,’ ” Davis said.
“In Montana, I felt the most resistance because — I don’t know that it was — I think
some of those guys, having a camera in front of them, they’re a little sheepish. Basically, I think beautiful things don’t ask for attention. … And so for the people sometimes within it, if a camera gets in front of them, they can be a little resistant to that.”
It was different in Latin America where his presence was at first mystifying but ultimately accepted.
“It may as well been like a UFO hovering around. It was like, ‘What is this?’ ” Davis says. “I felt the least resistance in those places. … They were just like, ‘Hey, this guy is new, he seems like he wants to work with us. Let’s do it.’ ”
One of the film’s most memorable scenes is one in total silence, recorded while Davis was working with a group of Argentinean cowboys.
“That was truly special that they didn’t need to speak a whole lot,” he says. “It reminded me of just being humble, being gentle, being kind of low and not thinking too highly of yourself. … They’re just very humble figures whom I connected with because of their humility and their ability to just be in the moment, not be on their phones all the time. They didn’t even have phones.”
It’s just one of the striking images in a film that, thanks in part to Alex Walker’s vivid cinematography and Bobby Villarreal’s haunting score — which brings to mind Explosions in the Sky’s songs used in the Texas-set “Friday Night Lights” — often lets the landscape and the light do the talking.
What’s next?
Now that “Cowboys Without Borders” is finished, Davis — a new dad with a 3-month-old son — is not sure what comes next. Though his in-laws still live in the Houston area — in fact, he and his wife “met cute” at the Original Ninfa’s where he was a vendor and she was a customer — he and his family now live in Fort Worth, he would like to continue making films.
He says that producer/actor Wyatt McCrea, grandson of famous actor Joel McCrea, told him that “Cowboys Without Borders” made him cry and that he was going to get it in front of Kevin Costner and writer/director Taylor Sheridan of “Yellowstone” fame.
“I love working with my hands. I love working in the steel industry. If I can find a way to balance the two and continue to make projects, I want to,” he says. “And I intend to do that with or without the help of a Kevin Costner. … But, boy, it would be great to have more resources, more people that we can build relationships and create Westerns. Hollywood started with Westerns and I think there will always be a place for it.
“This is a starting block, a steppingstone. And so I don’t know where it goes from here.”