Michael Buckner/Deadline
Jody Hill and Danny McBride’s creative fusion has a brazenly hysterical yet sincere way of showing the underbelly of men; characters who aspire to greatness, but through their flaws, fall short as divorced fathers or misfits, from the Sundance hit that made the duo, The Foot Fist Way, to their latest HBO comedy series, Vice Principals.
At the premiere of The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter at SXSW over the weekend, Hill, who directed and co-wrote with McBride and John Carcieri, mentioned that shooting the Netflix movie was akin to a “poor man’s Revenant,” referring to the environmental challenges that Alejandro Inarritu encountered in shooting his Oscar-winning picture.
“North Carolina is not like shooting in the woods in California, where there’s all theses pull-ups next to beautiful places and state parks,” Hill tells Deadline. “Ours, we had to walk to the woods an hour each day to get to something.”
While McBride often plays the disrespected outsider in Hill’s ouevre, Brolin took on that role, specifically Buck Ferguson, a celebrity deer hunter, who is trying to bond with his young son (Montana Jordan) as a divorce looms. All this in the midst of dealing with rope bridges, misfired rifles, and whitewater rafting. Hill and McBride’s inspiration were ’80s hunting videos. In the movie, McBride plays Buck’s trusted cameraman Don as they venture through the great brush to shoot both antlers and does.
Brolin, who has been a fan of the duo’s Eastbound and Down HBO series, says that Whitetail Deer Hunter “was something different for me to do. It was comedic, but it was different than what I was used to. There was a seriousness to it, it was a great story, a father-son story, a coming of age story. There were a lot of elements that made it very interesting to me. It felt like there was enough to study where I can earn it.”
The pic streams on July 6. Carrie Coon, Scoot McNairy, and Montana Jordan also star. For upcoming screenings at SXSW, click here.
The Deadline Studio at SXSW 2018 is presented by MoviePass.
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