Despite a lengthy, eclectic career, Nicolas Cage has never worked on an out-and-out (or oat-and-oat) Western. He's looking to remedy that with not one but two movies, and the first to shoot will be The Old Way.
The movie will see Cage as Colton Briggs, a former gunslinger who now runs a general store and lives quietly with his family. When a gang of outlaws murders his wife in cold blood, Briggs returns home to find his world burning. He unearths his sidearm and saddles up with an unlikely partner: his twelve-year-old daughter. Brett Donowho is directing from Carl W. Lucas' script.
We mentioned the two films aspect, and that's because he's also attached to make Butcher's Crossing, which the actor will shoot back to back with Old Way in Montana. Butcher's Crossing, which has been in development for a while, is set in 1870, and is an adventure following a man who drops out of Harvard to pursue a dream of heading West to the titular Kansas town. Once there, he joins the search for a great buffalo herd with a group of hunters led by Cage's Miller. Gabe Polsky is directing that one, sharing script duties with Liam Satre-Meloy, the pair adapting John Williams' (no, not the composer) 1960 novel.
"After 43 years in cinema, I’m only now being invited to the important and storied genre of the Western with both The Old Way and Butcher’s Crossing,” Cage says in a statement picked up by Deadline. "Being born and raised in the West, this is another good match and long overdue. I’m excited and compelled by the complex characters of both Briggs and Miller, and to find new ground to play at 57 is indeed galvanizing."
Cage is on our screens now in Pig and has Prisoners Of The Ghostland due on 17 September.