‘Butcher’s Crossing’s Gabe Polsky, Nicolas Cage, Fred Hechinger, Paul Raci & Ervin Carlson On The “Dark Side Of Human Nature” – Toronto Studio:

Director Gabe Polsky has been trying to bring Butcher’s Crossing to the screen for over a decade. When he first read the novel, he was struck by the thematic structure and character development.

“It’s a story that’s very fundamental about life and about human nature,” says director Gabe Polsky.

Based on the John Edward Williams novel of the same name, Butcher’s Crossing follows Will (Fred Hechinger), a Harvard dropout who seeks to explore the Western Frontier of America in search of purpose. His quest to join a buffalo hunt leads him to Miller (Nicolas Cage), an ambitious hunter set on the biggest hunt of his life.

Nicolas Cage plays Miller, a buffalo hunter whose mysterious presence convinces a young Will to spend all of his money on a dangerous expedition.

“There’s something about the dark side of human nature,” says Cage, “where there’s a bloodlust that gets combined with greed and the need to succeed that’s in all of these characters.”

Coming off of his role as Quinn in The White Lotus, Fred Hechinger found a similarity in the role of Will Andrews. Both characters are drawn to find a sense of purpose, though his character in Butcher’s Crossing has a much harsher reality check.

“What really drew me to Will,” says Fred, “is that it’s a character who wants to find that sense of purpose and that naïveté of thinking that this sort of personal journey is the genuine thing, and through that not only finding out that he is a pawn in something much larger and darker, but actually becomes a perpetrator in that darkness. I think is a very important part of how you decide where you go and what you do with yourself.”

Paul Raci found common ground with the writer of the original novel, John Williams, which led him to a better deeper appreciation of the story.

“John Williams was a Vietnam veteran and I’m a Vietnam veteran, I did two tours in Vietnam,” says Raci, “so knowing that, that he wrote a coming of age story about a young man in 1860… and what he goes through in that journey is exactly what my journey was in Vietnam. I went into Vietnam as a young man like John Wayne, because that’s what my grandfather told me to do. But after my four year experience in the war, I came out as Lenny Bruce. I knew I was used, I knew I was squeezed dry, and I was a different person, just like what’s happening in the Ukraine right now. All of those young boys doing the bidding of Putin, I was doing Nixon’s bidding. So, the parallels are so strong and deep for me personally.”

Ervin Carlson, Director of the Blackfeet Buffalo Program, joined the film in an advisory role. As someone who is responsible for bringing the Buffalo population back from near extinction, it was important to Carlson that the film show respect to the animal.

“I’ve been involved in bringing back Buffalo into Tribal lands,” says Carlson, “so I was glad to be there to make sure that everything that the movie had done, had done it right with respect to the animal… The movie portrays where they got rid of most of the buffalo, and so they wanted to find a new part to actually kill the rest of them off. That was really our livelihood, Native Americans, that was our livelihood – our food, our clothes, our lodging. Our economy I guess, you’d call it, and that was all taken away from us.”

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