Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a feature film shot in New Orleans, NYC, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, produced by Tommy Vita, and is a co-production with Empty Seat Productions.

Billy is an ex-con, looking to walk the straight and narrow. Sadie is one of his girls from his pimping days, who recently stole some money and is looking for his protection from the criminals who she stole it from.

Billy is caught between his moral obligation to one of his former girls, and what is in his own best interest.

Behind the Movie

This movie started as a loose exploration of emotional intelligence versus the intellect.  Within our genetic make-up, there is the drive to respond to situations impulsively, without the filter of good judgement.  Allowing the intellect to step in during conflict is a matter of retraining intuition, and not part of our curated development.  This emotional impulsiveness is the flip side of the Woody Allen characters who have the tendency to over anylize every moment.  This impulsiveness and hyper-analysis, although opposites, are equally paralyzing and destructive.

Characters

Billy and Sadie became the characters through which we would examine the idea of smart people making bad decisions - or rather emotional intelligence dictating actions over the intellect.  To explore the idea of impulsiveness, I initially entertained the idea of gluttony, but after extensive note-taking, and thinking of asking Tommy to put on fifty pounds, I shifted to criminals who earned their livings selling sex, aka Billy the Pimp, and Sadie, his girl.

Billy went to jail covering for his boss.  Behind bars, he saw his future in the lives of his fellow inmates.  He made the decision to go clean upon his release.  Sadie is afraid to do anything new, despite her aptitude.   She repeatedly falls back on a profession she hates, but where she feels safe in that it is what she already knows.

Casting

This movie was initially written for Tommy Vita and Rebecca Barras.  When it came time to jump into preproduction, our schedules didn't align, and we had to recast Sadie.  We took this opportunity to cast outside of our "go to" actors, and went through the long process of casting online.  

Claire Ganshert was one of hundreds who auditioned out of NYC for the part of Sadie.  We had narrowed the selection down to four actors who were seriously in consideration.  With the long distance online casting, it is difficult to whittle it down closer than that.  Once committing to Claire as Sadie, we filled in the cast with the three other actors whose head shots were rotating on the board.

And fortunately, we were able to get Rebecca on set for one day, for a fun day of shooting and arcades afterwards.

Kim Collins as Tweetie

We will write Kim into a movie any time we have the opportunity.  He cares about the characters he plays more than any other actor we've worked with.  Here he was cast as Billy's dad, Tweetie.  This was the only scene in the movie shot in New Orleans, and one of the scenes where Eileen stood in as cinematographer.  This was also the day the cops were called as our scene was reported as domestic violence by one of the neighbors.  Probably the eighth time we learned that we should inform the neighbors that we are shooting a movie.

On Location

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea was a micro-budget shoot.  There was no budget for locations, and for the most part, we got extremely lucky with the shoot.  The movie was originally written to be shot in NYC, based on my childhood memory.  Common sense amiss, I wrote a script based on what NYC looked like in the 1980s.  Nothing matched aesthetically when we travelled up to NYC for a location scout.  Fortunately, in Philadelphia, a lot of public spaces are very cinematic, and for the most part, fit what we needed.

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is complete and currently in search of distribution.