Filmmaker And Actor Eric Jacobus On DETOUR, The Long-Awaited Martial Arts Comedy Sequel To ‘Contour’: ‘I Need To Do This Now’ [Exclusive]

Production has a long ways to go for filmmaker, actor, stunt professional, mo-cap facilitator and author Eric Jacobus. This can be said for virtually any of the projects that he’s crafting at the moment, and there are certainly a few that will get a highlight this week, namely Detour, the long-awaited sequel to Contour, Jacobus’s independently-produced 2006 martial arts action-packed love letter to Hong Kong cinema in which he starred and directed under The Stunt People label.

Contour was a home release hit on DVD, especially for The Stunt People’s Jacobus who would go on to spend the next twenty years recurring on a number of projects with Dennis Ruel, an actor and martial artist and a fellow of The Stunt People since its heyday. The two appeared in shortfilms like Jose Montesinos’ “The Winds Of Time” webseries, and more notably, “Rope-A-Dope” and “Rope-A-Dope 2: Return Of The Martial Arts Mafia” in addition to pairing up as the action stewards for Vasan Bala’s The Man Who Feels No Pain (मर्द को दर्द नहीं होता), starring Abhimanyu Dassani.

More recently, Jacobus and Ruel were invited to the Montreal set to put together for a fight scene for Olivier Godin’s newest comedy, Don’t Forget The Oatmeal. That was in late 2024, long prior to the post-production process and subsequent World Premiere for Montreal Critics’ Week seven months ago back in January. Alas, little did anyone know that the ceremony for Jacobus and everyone in his circle would become stifled by news of Ruel’s sudden passing on April 9, 2025 at the age of 45.

Ruel was one of the most brilliant performers and creatives of his time, and a boon to his community, and there’s no doubt that some of his friends continue to celebrate or mourn Ruel’s memory to this day, including filmmakers and longtime friends like Jose Montesinos who credits his Barrio Brawler co-star Ruel on the fruition of upcoming action thriller, Mary Magnum: Jiu-Jitsu Nun, which according to Montesinos on Instagram in was the title Ruel came up with. Additionally and to this extent, Ruel’s legacy is also the center of discussion as I pursued an inquiry with Jacobus on Detour and its future.

Jacobus announced Detour last February while keeping in direct touch with his fans over at Discord, and hinted at a few elements he was studying to help craft his story. I’m still uncertain if his research into Navajo and indigenous economics is still pertinent to his development. Moreover, while news of the film’s announcement made the rounds prior to last April, Friday’s update comes several months after Jacobus began new dialogue over at Discord on his latest shortfilm, Bag Lady, during which he also revealed a few story tidbits for Detour. 

The rough logline for Detour is a long one so far, but a sum-up of it thusfar ultimately sees Jacobus reprising the role of pseudo-reformed thief Lawrence “Law” Young. Set twenty years after the first film, Law now lives in Las Vegas with a new van, still working as a tour guide to support his now-teenage aspiring artist daughter, Rowan, who he holds dear. In an effort to keep his daughter in his life when her stepfather intrudes on their future plans, he’s left with no choice but to do whatever it takes, even risking safe haven across state lines, and Rowan learning about his past and concurrent life of crime.

Plans are in motion to revisit and grow other concepts Jacobus has in mind like animated action adventure, Violent Rhythm which he announced in 2021 as Katzenjammer (FKA), and half-hour sci-fi action shortfilm concept, Bag Lady, which recently screened for the University of Nevada in Las Vegas earlier this month. I managed to get some answers and details from Jacobus this week in a recent inquiry in an effort to follow up on Detour as the crux of this coverage, and I’m especially thankful to Jacobus for speaking so emphatically about these projects, as well as about his work and friendship with the late Ruel about their adventures.

Read on, and sub to Jacobus on Instagram @ericjacobusofficial.

It’s been a little over a year after Dennis’s passing. Talk about how life has been for you in trying to process losing a friend, even while working your way back into creativity.

Yes, it’s been a little over a year now and that was obviously a huge shock to the whole indie community for multiple reasons. Den was a very dear part of our community. I like to say he “set the tone” because he was kind of uncompromising regarding the indie spirit and I just love that about him. I remember we were in India doing The Man Who Feels No Pain, and there were a lot of fights with him where he wasn’t willing to compromise, and at first I would find a way to please the client first, I think. But then now, in retrospect I think he sorta might’ve been right about a lot of things. There were certain things that he just wouldn’t let go, and of course there were times when we have to let certain things go, we have to let the vision go a little bit because we don’t have enough time, but he was always that force where he would always remind me of where we came from, what our principles were, and he was just a die-hard artist. So, not only did I feel like we lost that, but I felt like I lost a creative partner who was instrumental in some of our greatest stuff.

You know, it was around July when I was at Comic-Con and I was sitting on Ric Meyers’s Superhero Kung Fu Extravaganza panel that I noticed that all of the films we were previewing were very serious, very dark, there was a lot of blood vengeance, a lot of cutting and stabbing and all this–and this is the sort of tone we have right now in the action world, and I just remember having a lot of conversations with Dennis about that tone that has been sort of the tone for the past twenty years. It’s just this very grungy tone – in fact, I just wrote an article about it on my blog – and Dennis and I were always trying to find a way to get out of that. We were writing a spoof on the side, and we wanted to do a sequel to Contour, obviously, and we talked for years about “the next thing that we were gonna do”. It was gonna be this sort of antidote to the grungy action that was everywhere. Everybody’s doing “creative murder” and we wanna make people laugh. We talked about it for years and never did anything, and now he’s gone, and I can’t do that with him now. And so it hit me when I was on that panel that “I need to do this now. I need to make a comedy.” And that’s when I started making my new film, and we made it as a short. It’s called Bag Lady, but we’re turning it into a feature; Right now it’s titled “Replacers,” so that came out of that.

Also, Dennis died with a wealth of knowledge that he shared in these packets with people. I kind of understood Dennis from the filmmaker perspective. A lot of people understood Dennis as a martial arts teacher. There were friends of his who understood Dennis as “the music maker.” The guy made music. There’s a whole domain of the business that knows Dennis as an amazing stunt coordinator, mo-cap coordinator… the guy was brilliant, and he didn’t blog, he didn’t do interviews, and it’s a tragedy that his knowledge is sort of stored up in a bunch of us, and it’s on us now to kind of compile all of it. And, if only we could have gotten a book out of him, you know? Or a documentary– and we didn’t. That’s what inspired me to write “Badass On A Budget: A Timeless Guide For Zero-Budget Action Filmmakers”. I dedicated it to him, and…you know, there’s a part of me where I hate the fact that one of my best friends’ death spurs this creativity in me. I kinda hate that about myself. I wish I could awaken that just randomly. I wish I could have awakened that when he was around, and it just didn’t. It just didn’t happen that way. So there’s a part of me that’s kinda just really sour about that, but I think that maybe that’s just [one of]– the realities of life is that a lot of the time we don’t know how good we have it until it’s gone, and how much easier things would be until it’s gone, and that’s just a hard lesson that I think I learned from this, I think it’s a hard lesson a lot of people learned; You know, Jose Montesinos made Mary Magnum as well, I mean that is a feat of a movie: A shoestring budget, they shot it in no time, TONS of people in it, and amazing performances. So, it’s very bittersweet. That’s the best way I can explain it.

Contour still garners ceremony for action fans even after all these years. How does that make you feel?

I’m really excited that people like this movie. Olivier Godin who did Don’t Forget The Oatmeal wrote an article about it talking about how Contour is this kind of “art piece”. It’s “punk rock,” right? “It’s not grunge, I consider it punk rock.” And, Olivier was the one who said “Eric, I think Contour is your middle finger to film school,” and I didn’t even realize that when I was making Contour–I didn’t know that at all, and sometimes it just takes somebody else to look at your work and kind of put their finger on the meaning of it for you, and that’s absolutely true! I think a lot of people can see that. I think that registers for people, and not just the aesthetics, right? It’s crass, it’s politically incorrect, there’s just a lot of potty humor and there’s Monty Python-level drag humor, right? Some of that stuff is really cringy. [laughs] But, had we asked for permission to do that stuff, it would’ve been “no” down the line. There would’ve been “no” for the drag, there would’ve been “no” for the “Tuoc” character, there would’ve been a “no” for all these things, and they would’ve insisted we get a name and we do lighting a certain way, all this stuff. And we just didn’t do that. We just didn’t ask for permission and I think that’s what people see in that movie.

I still hear from people who saw [Contour] in high school and [say] that inspired them. It’s interesting because that’s something similar with me. I saw Koichi Sakamoto’s Extreme Heist. That’s what inspired me. Extreme Heist was made on a shoestring budget also. Nobody asked for permission for anything on that movie, and they were blowing up vehicles and shooting on the strip in Las Vegas, I mean, talk about Guerilla Filmmaking. We can’t even touch that. We had the luxury of, however, just spending a ton of time on Contour. It was just this brief moment in our lives when we could do that and we just set out to make the sort of “ultimate homage” to Dragons Forever with an ensemble cast and a big fight scene in a warehouse at the end and that’s exactly what we did. But I think now that I look at it too, it’s not like the fights are without context. I mean, there’s a bit of kind of love we put into the characters too. I remember on day one when I was working with Dennis, and it was that opening scene with the fight scene in the warehouse at night where I deliver the bag late, and I remember acting with him and immediately going “Oh shit, this guy can act!”. And it just put me on my heels, and that set the tone for the movie, man. And I remember the entire movie after that I was thinking “this guy brings it up, I gotta bring it up too”. And yeah, the movie’s goofy, but people cheer for the characters, people quote the movie, and that means a lot to me.

You mentioned Don’t Forget The Oatmeal which I think is still at festivals. How was that experience for both of you, if you may? Also, what can fans expect from that collaboration?

Olivier asked us to come up with a fight scene in a bar for Don’t Forget The Oatmeal. He gave us a very loose frame work, and he sort of told me “I want you and Dennis to do it” because Olivier, he loved Contour and Rope-A-Dope. He said “I want it to be you and Dennis. I want you guys to do something funny with some kung fu homages in it, and just go crazy.” He said “Eric, you’re playing a drunk, and Dennis is playing a boxer, and you’re doing this…almost mythically [laughs] high-stakes fight in a bar. And so the first thing was we pre-vizzed it, and the way Dennis and I pre-viz –we kinda had an improv-style of pre-viz where we don’t “buckle down” and figure out the moves. We watch a lot of videos, we talk and laugh, and we come up with little scenarios, we make props, we put on costumes, we try random things out and we just laugh. And the whole point of pre-viz for us was to be as creative as possible. Those are moments I just cherish now when I think about working with him, and I try and do that now with every film: remember that process of just having fun and being very creative during pre-viz.

We spent two days doing pre-viz and then we went to Montreal for a two-day shoot, and Montreal was lovely. The people are lovely there. The weather was beautiful –it was Winter, but it was beautiful. Dennis didn’t wanna come home [laughs], he absolutely fell in love with Montreal. He was trying to figure out an exit strategy to move to Montreal someday. The shoot was great. We just shot in this little bar for two days, and it was very much like a Stunt People shoot. The camera was on a tripod for the whole thing and we would just act for the camera. It felt very “Jackie Chan,” I should say. It felt very “Jackie Chan,” and we just got to do our thing, and that was perfect for me. And we made a great friend in Olivier and Renaud [the cinematographer] and we are working on projects with them now, and I am gonna miss Dennis on all of these things. And so, in the future, you can expect some more collaborations from myself and the Montreal team, because I think we speak a very similar language. Olivier loves comedy, he loves Jacques Tati, he loves [Jean-Paul] Belmondo, he loves Takeshi Kitano – these are all my jam and he loves this stuff, so we see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, so I’m very excited about what we’ll be working together on in the future.

You’d also been cracking away at Detour which you officially announced early last year as you were putting pen to paper. Talk about what’s kept you going since then. Also, what’s changed in that process for you, for creating the story and possibly setting newer things in motion in following up the first film, and even honoring Dennis’ memory (re: Ticker) in some capacity?

You know, a year after making Contour, I had the idea for Detour and just didn’t execute on it, because I was still kind of an amateur with screenwriting and I didn’t quite have an idea on how to do this movie, so I shelved it and did Death Grip instead. After that when we released Contour in 4K online, the team and I started talking and said “We should do a sequel, I think we can do this.” I have better sentiment on how to write a story now and how to make an action film work as a story, and how to make a character like Law work. I’m forty-four now, so Law’s gonna be forty-four now and “who is this guy and why should we care about him? Is he just a sociopathic tour guide anymore?,” you know? That was my attitude when I was twenty two and made that movie. That’s not my attitude anymore, I’m very different now. I have kids now, I run a business, I have responsibilities in bringing up another generation of filmmakers, hopefully, so I have a very different sort of reason about myself, and so I want Law to have some responsibilities now. Perhaps he’s got a child now who’s growing up, and this could raise the stakes and kind of bring him into a new kind of world.

One of the other things I wanted to explore is getting into some anthropology this time. I think that after doing Death Grip, it’s sort of my first foray into anthropology where I came up with the Coins of Judas, right? Now after I’ve been researching anthropology for almost a decade now, I can come up with some really interesting hooks for the story to make a really interesting Law, and especially playing on themes of the Southwest because I’m based in Vegas now, so if Law is based in Vegas, you know, where there are some interesting McGuffins that could get him on this interesting journey with his tour group, right?

I don’t know how much I will point directly to Dennis. I did have some mention of the Ticker character in an earlier version of the script, but it just felt a little bit forced in, so I took it out. I don’t quite know how to do that in a mature way. If I can find a way to do it, I’ll do it. I think that that’s actually gonna come from some of the co-stars like Ray Carbonel. I plan to bring Ray back, and I think it would have to be a decision with him how we play that.

I also covered an animation project you shelved since we last spoke. Officially (or unofficially), what’s the latest on this one?

Yeah, that animation is called Violent Rhythm. Last we spoke, I’d taken that to the American Film Market and shopped it around and found exactly how difficult it is to get an animation off the ground. I think things have changed in the past couple of years, although maybe concerning animation things haven’t changed too much. One temptation is to just do the entire thing in AI but I can’t imagine doing that. I don’t think I can give truth to these characters it they’re animated using AI. I just can’t imagine that. But maybe there are gonna be tools that’ll be coming out soon that will allow us to take true human movement and make it look like animation. I don’t know.

But you know, we’ve made some great pre-vizzes for that, and after doing the Bag Lady short and hopefully after doing the feature version of that movie, we’ll have a bit of a community here in Vegas where maybe we can execute on this movie. So, it’s definitely not dead. The script probably needs a revision, but I still think that the topic is very relevant. In fact, it’s probably more relevant now than ever. Violent Rhythm is about an entertainment studio that is run by AI, and there’s a lot of fun and mythical kind of stuff in there that would make it very different from the Bag Lady film which is also about AI. So, I expect that we will probably get back into that again. I do wanna go back into the script this year and rewrite that and see what we can do with it.

How many books do you have in your collection, roughly?

All in all, I think I probably have about eight hundred to nine hundred books. Maybe a thousand if I count– I’ve got a list where I keep track of all of them. I’ve got about eight hundred and thirty on there, but there’s probably like another hundred so that I just haven’t listed. And I’m at about a fifty percent read rate which is not bad [laughs]. I’m trying to get it up to sixty-six so that I don’t just keep buying new books. So there’s a little bit of discipline now where I don’t buy two books until I’ve read three, if that makes sense. I’m trying to get that percentage up.

How soon are you looking to roll cameras, and are you eyeing a return to “the warehouse”?

I don’t know. When we shoot Detour, it feels like it’ll be in the two million dollar range and would take me a little bit of clout to get that kind of money. Maybe I need to do a film before that, and I think we’re gonna go far beyond a warehouse. It’s gonna be much bigger than that.

How many former SP faces do you estimate you can snag for roles? Any newcomers in mind?

As many as I can get! [laughs] Bear in mind, most if not all of The Stunt People got full time jobs and a lot of them have kids so it’s as difficult to pull them away as it’d be difficult to pull me away, but I have roles in there for certain members. Definitely Ray, hopefully Ed [Kahana Jr.] if I can get him. I got an interesting role for him if we can pull it off, and I think we’re gonna approach a kind of, like, how Takeshi Kitano does with his movies where we sort of play new characters, like Law will be the same character, and other actors will be different characters, and let them kind of flex their muscles in some ways.

Are you working on anymore books, and do you still find time to read?

I’m working on a lot of books at once, but I don’t really work hard at a book until one of them makes sense to start writing. Like, “Badass On A Budget” suddenly hit me and I just buckled down and wrote that book, and there hasn’t been a book that’s hit me yet. So in the meantime, what I do is I’ve got this stack of these cards that are all book ideas, and each one of them has like a list of twenty-something books, and so I just read down that list. And, I take a book off, take a book off, and hopefully at some point if I finish that list, you know, maybe it’s time to write that book. We’ll see. I have a book that’s kind of similar to my first book. It’s more science based. I’ve got a fiction– a science fiction that I wanna write, so there’s a lot and I don’t really know what I’m gonna write yet. Trying not to worry about it too much. [laughs]