Abel’s Promise writer-director, Anthony Crossen, sat down with us to discuss what motivated him to conjure this unique story…

AC:  “Abel’s Promise came from an issue I think is underrepresented in the movies: men in pain.  (Laughing)  I guess all my movies deal with men in pain.  My first feature script, Pieces of Silver, is an action-horror yarn, but at its root it’s about teen rage, feeling unloved and lost after your parent’s divorce.   In OP Winchester, an optioned but unproduced Afghan war movie, a young Soldier is plagued by his father’s death.  His search for a replacement comes to a head when he has to decide to move past his hang ups, to move on with his life in order to survive.”

Why haven’t we heard of these other movies?

AC:  “Pieces of Silver is out to market, but it was my first script.  OP Winchester has been optioned three times, but no takers.  It’s currently available.”

Why aren’t there more films dealing with men in pain?

AC:  “There have been some [films].  Nick Cage won that Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas,  a character in obvious pain.  Christopher Nolan deals with men’s pain in the Batman series, Inception, and most recently, Man of Steel.  But for the most part, you’re right.  We never go too deep, and it’s always overshadowed by fantastic violence.  Remember Die Hard?  That John McClane guy was agonizing over his wife, but the issue was quickly swept aside as the action unfolded.  Violence seems to come from a place motivated by the filmmakers trying to tell a cool story.

“My point of view comes from personal experience, three combat deployments.  When you’re confronted with being away from your loved ones for a year, and the realities of ‘kill or be killed…’  I experienced a fundamental switch in my psyche regarding boundaries I thought I’d never personally cross.

“I’ve been blown up.  I’ve experienced death in combat.  Very quickly, my mission became survival for me and my men, to get back home in one piece.  I decide that nothing – absolutely nothing – would get in the way of that, so long as I had the tools and maintained the initiative to make it happen.  I suddenly found it easy to do the inexplicable.  I thank God I never had to put a bad guy down or was ever in a protracted fire fight.  There are always consequences to violence, predominantly for the warfighter, a scarring of the mind.  But I can tell you from personal experience, it would not have been a problem.

“Anyway, I wanted to examine that with Abel’s Promise.  In the first act, Abel Polaski’s switch has already been flipped.  We learn as the story unfolds, what caused that switch to flip, and how far he goes to preserve his family.”

Thanks, Anthony.

AC:  “Thank you.”