Jon Seda and Christian Sesma are exploring a different kind of shark movie and bringing a genre icon with them for Into the Deep. Sesma, a genre veteran after helming everything from the Val Kilmer-starring Paydirt to Frank Grillo’s Lights Out, reunites with writers Chad Law and Josh Ridgway for the film, having found himself drawn into their script by the fact it’s more of a straightforward thriller than a familiar creature feature. This also changed his approach to building out the cast for the film, including Seda in a rare villain role and Richard Dreyfuss in his first shark film since Jaws.

Into the Deep revolves around marine biologist Cᴀssidy (Scout Taylor-Compton), who finds her and her husband’s diving trip interrupted by modern-day pirates taking her and the others on their boat hostage in an effort to reacquire a lost shipment of drugs. The pirate group is led by Seda’s Jordan, a sociopathic former Navy SEAL who shows a unique respect for nature and the sharks in the nearby area. However, as his desperation grows to get the drugs on the ocean floor, he pushes Cᴀssidy and the divers to recover them for him, inadvertently endangering them all.

In honor of the movie’s release, ScreenRant interviewed Jon Seda and Christian Sesma to discuss Into the Deep. The director reflected on the unique journey to getting the movie made, including his efforts to convince Dreyfuss to return to the shark genre 50 years later, as well as being unable to use practical effects for the film. Seda, meanwhile, discussed changing his approach to playing a villain after being known for playing protagonists, as well as being wowed by Sesma’s confidence in the director’s chair, and his thoughts on a potential One Chicago return.

Seda Really Put His Trust In Sesma For Various Aspects Of The Film

From Storyboards To Creative Conversations, The Director Knew What He Wanted

Beyond what can be found in the video above, Seda reflected deeper on his experience working with Sesma in the director’s chair on Into the Deep. The star recalled being moved by the fact that Sesma “just really knew exactly what he wanted” from every aspect of the film, while also praising the trust he was able to build with him and the rest of the crew during production:

Jon Seda: What I loved about Christian was the fact he just really knew exactly what he wanted. He had a vision, and he had great people, like Niccolo De La Fere, the cinematographer, camera operator. He’s just very precise in knowing what he wanted, and I think that confidence gave me more of a boost, just for my performance, to kind of take that same kind of vantage point that Christian was giving out, that real confidence, and added a little bit of that to Jordan.

So, in that respect, in that regard, I’ve worked with a lot of a lot of great directors, a lot of different characters, a lot of different people, but Christian, really, he knows what he wants, and he’s sure about it, and you can really trust him. And trust is a big, big thing in this industry. I just felt so comfortable in his hands, and I think we all did. I could speak for the other actors, as well, everyone just felt comfortable with him. So, I think that’s a huge part of it. That he garnishes is really something that uplifts all of us as actors.

Continuing on from Sesma’s vision, Seda confirmed that much of Jordan’s look actually came from a storyboard-like drawing done by the director. This almost even led to a brief hiccup in Sesma’s plans when Seda considered changing things up with a haircut and a full beard, only for the director to quickly ask him to keep it all intact. As to the actual personality of the villain, Seda again found he put the majority of his trust in Sesma, though did recall feeling uncertain that one of his big speeches would make it into the final cut of the film:

Jon Seda: Christian was really good. Like I said, Christian has a vision not just for a wide sH๏τ of a scene where there’s no actors, to a sH๏τ that’s тιԍнт and close up on an actor. He has the whole vision, he’s got the storyboard in [his head], and he actually sent me — I’m sure he sent it to everybody — a kind of storyboard-ish thing with the characters, the vision that he had from all the clothes they wore, to the facial hair, if they had any or not. He had a pretty solid vision. And for me at the time, my hair happened to be pretty long when I was filming. I guess it was kind of done around here, and actually, it was pretty long.

So, that helped, and I remember I was almost going to cut it, and I remember Christian called me and went, “Hey, is your hair still long?” I said, “Yeah,” and he was like, “Keep it, keep like that!” [Chuckles] Because he had a vision of the hair pulled back. And I thought about maybe going with a beard or something, and he was like, “No, let’s just keep [it shaved].” So the look was very thought out. I didn’t write this, this isn’t something that I came up with, so I believe in their vision, and I just kind of take what he saw. I mean, if it was so from left field, and didn’t make sense, it was something we’d converse about. But I do my part, which is to try to take what they see and what they’ve written, what Chad Law and Josh Ridgeway wrote, and Christian’s vision, take it in here, and put all the pieces together, like the backstory, all that.

It’s like a football player on Sunday. It’s not my uniform, it’s their uniform, but I just gotta make sure it fits. Put it on and let’s go to work. That’s kind of how the look came about, and the scar and that all plays into how I go about the character. There’s a reason why that scar is there. Obviously, he’s wearing a necklace, there’s a pretty long description that he gives, which is very Jordan like, you know, to just stop and give a class in the middle of someone dying, who’s just been eaten up by a shark. But, he is well-versed with the sharks, and he knows a lot about them, so there’s that connection, too. I remember when we were doing [that speech], I was like — because, like I said, my job as an actor is to act, I didn’t write it.

So, if there’s certain things that don’t make sense, yeah, we’ll talk about certain words or sentences. But, if they want me to say something that’s just crazy-ish from left field, my job is to try to make that work. And when they see it in the editing room, if it works for them, and they want to keep it, they keep it. If they don’t want to, they’ll cut it out. On other projects, that’s happened, you know, you do something, later on, they cut it out, and you go, “Yeah, well, it makes sense why they cut that out.” So, when we were filming, I remember thinking, “They’re not going to keep this whole speech, there’s just no way. They’re probably going to cut it up.” [Chuckles]

But they kept the whole speech, and it made sense, because when I look at it, the reaction from the other characters in the scene is like, “What the hell is going on? What is going on? What is he talking about? Someone’s dying here, and he’s here to help. Is he helping us? What is he doing?” If that’s the reaction, then I think it worked.

Another area where Seda found himself putting his trust in Sesma’s vision was the depiction of the sharks themselves, as no practical sharks were used for Into the Deep, all of them being created with visual effects. This, in turn, presented a new challenge for Seda, who hasn’t worked on many VFX-heavy projects, and it was again Sesma’s dedication to being well-prepared for a production that gave the star the tools needed to believably put together the shark scenes:

Jon Seda: Honestly, I didn’t, it’s not like I did a lot of research and stuff, but just having conversations with Christian and talking to the writers, just talking about how they see it. I mean, honestly, I don’t think it takes much to act scared of the shark, in a sense, you know? I’m here, and I got the ocean when looking out the window, and I can’t even imagine being in the water and there’s a shark there. So, yeah, and Jordan has so much respect for them, which that end scene, it’s just ironic how he comes to his demise in such a way with the sharks. But, yeah, I didn’t really do too much research.

I wanted a lot of stuff to just kind of come more organic. Sometimes, you can do too much, if too much research, in a sense — it depends on what the project is, what the character is. Sometimes, just going with just enough understanding of what’s being asked of you, and just trying your best to make that as organic as you can, I think that sometimes that’s where you find gold. Sometimes, in one take, you find gold, sometimes it’ll take 10 takes. We didn’t have room for a lot of takes, so, you just had to try to live it, be in that moment, and be present. Especially that death scene, going over the boat into the water. I think we might have done it twice, because it’s tough. You go over it, and you got to reset everything and all that.

It was kudos to the crew and how they were able to set up. The boats are always moving, and Niccolo and his team are out there on a little raft with the cameras in the water, and they’re setting the lighting, and they’re setting all the makeup, and the blood and all that. By the time they get it set, the boats have shifted, so now, you’ve got a different background that doesn’t match where you were before, and the lighting is different. So now, you’ve got to reset, and it’s slow to reset everything you know, and then try to set it all up again. So, that happened a few times where you got the fact that you were dealing with all those elements to be able to get it in a couple takes.

Sesma Had To Do A Lot Of Convincing To Get Dreyfuss On Board

The Director Also Spent A Lot Of Time Researching Sharks

While Sesma aimed to deliver a straightforward thriller rather than a classic shark movie, the fact that it was still part of the latter genre proved an interesting challenge for the director, as he really had to convince Dreyfuss to join the Into the Deep cast, particularly since he’s an avid defender of shark preservation since having starred in Steven Speilberg’s Jaws. This did, however, result in some meaningful conversations between the two, including ending the film with a PSA from Dreyfuss discussing shark preservation:

Christian Sesma: 100%, for sure. It wasn’t an easy sell, and it wasn’t an easy sell the first time. This was really just a moral case of how he wanted to enter it or not, because him and the original writer of Jaws had a really strong opinion on how that movie affected the actual ecosystem, so they didn’t want to do that. So we wanted to make sure his idea of how his character was going to come on fit into the narrative. So, the pitch from the beginning, even the original script, was that the sharks were never really the true villain in this movie. They’re dangerous, and you’re gonna get mauled by a shark if you’re messing with sharks, but it wasn’t the creature feature villain of the movie. So, I think that was what attracted him, too.

And I was like, “Okay, well, if we can do it this way and also kind of fit into the narrative of how I did the ending with Cᴀssidy’s cathartic moment of harmony with nature.” They’re not the villains, they’re not the bad guys. We’re just out of sync in nature here, so that attracted him to this, as well. So that, plus he really wanted to have an eco message in the end. He was like, “Okay, I can get behind something like this.” Yeah, you’re like, “See you later, roll credits.” [Chuckles] But I thought that was something that, again, felt was apropos for the film. You had a “shark movie” that didn’t make sharks the villain, and let’s really have a talk about this. And this is something that he really felt pᴀssionate about doing.

The movie’s dedication to being accurate in its shark depictions didn’t solely land on Dreyfuss, either, as Sesma spent a lot of time before and during production researching shark conservation, humorously recalling how his social media were flooded with various videos about them. He went on to describe how he recognizes that while Cᴀssidy’s ending with the shark might be anticlimactic in the way of the genre, he stands by it for being true to life, and giving the movie a chance to stand out:

Christian Sesma: Man, my Instagram Reels and algorithms and TikTok algorithms were like sharks, Great Whites, Shark Week. It was crazy for months and months. [Laughs] It was a ton of that. So, it wasn’t just when Dreyfus had these conversations, he knows a ton about the ecosystem and about shark conservation, but it was really about, “How are we going to make this stand out, where we still have to service the genre”, right? Like, we understand it’s dangerous, we’re building suspense, this and the other, but I think the most part, for me, I say this all the time, I wanted to have this “Use the Force, Luke” moment at the end with Cᴀssidy and the shark.

If Dreyfuss is Obi-Wan, and Cᴀssidy’s Luke, and then the whole time he’s trying to teach her something. At the end, you have that cathartic moment. How is that going to pay off, but in a way that is realistic on some level? Some people see it, and they go, “What?” I’m like, “You guys, if you’re ever coming across a tiger shark or a Great White, or something of that nature, you cannot run away. You cannot splash away.” You go watch Shark Week, they all have to turn and face the shark, take off the mask, the eyes have to match. So you have to see them, and you have to touch the nose and redirect. You can’t freak out. So, I felt like all of Dreyfuss’ teachings along the way were teaching her to conquer her fear enough to have that moment where she is face to face with her greatest fear, and she doesn’t give in to her fear.

She’s able to have this emotional moment where she just meets her fear head on, and is able just to deflect it, and it just kind of goes off, and that’s it. That’s the end of the shark. And I understand, for the genre, it’s a little bit anticlimactic in a violent way, but I felt like it was climactic in an emotional way. And that’s something that I felt I wanted to stand out, at least as an artist, and do something different than you would see in this kind of genre.

More About Into The Deep (2025)

Scout Taylor Compton and Richard Dreyfuss star in this action-packed thriller where modern-day pirates on the hunt for sunken drugs kidnap a boat of tourists and force them to dive into shark-infested waters to retrieve the contraband!

Source: ScreenRant Plus