For Anthony C. Ferrante, the filmmaker behind the cult-hit Sharknado franchise, the appeal of Dave the Diver was immediate. The hit indie game’s blend of adventure, absurdity and sincerity felt strangely familiar in a world where mutant creatures, eccentric characters and unexpected humor coexist without issue.

What began as a conversation with South Korean Japanese developer Mintrocket‘s CEO Jaeho Hwang about creating a promotional trailer for Dave the Diver: In the Jungle, the game’s new 10-hour DLC expansion, that follows the crew to the jungle to investigate a mysterious phenomenon reported in a village called Utara, soon evolved into something more ambitious.

Rather than simply tease the new content, Ferrante and the development team set out to bring the game’s universe into live action, working hand-in-hand throughout the process to ensure every character, costume and story beat felt authentic. 

Below, Deadline talks with Ferrante about translating the game’s unique tone to live action, and what’s next on the horizon. 

DEADLINE: How did Dave the Diver come to you? 

ANTHONY C. FERRANTE: I’ve directed a bunch of movies for The Asylum, and sometimes projects come to them. Dave the Diver was a project that Jaeho Hwang at Mintrocket brought the game to The Asylum because he was a huge fan of what The Asylum had done with Sharknado and Meth Gator. They were doing this Dave the Diver DLC, In the Jungle, which was going to have creatures in it, and they thought it would be fun to do a trailer in The Asylum aesthetic to promote the game. Since video game trailers aren’t necessarily a core business, it was like, “OK let’s talk to Anthony and see if he’s interested in spearheading this and bringing it to life.” That’s how it happened.

I played the game and loved it. They showed me trailers of what was coming before they came out. I did six Sharknado movies and definitely have a weird sense of humor, so I immediately appreciated what Mintrocket had created with Dave because it had that same anarchy that we sometimes bring to these projects. The conversations slowly turned into, “If we’re going to do a trailer, and we’re already going through the trouble of shooting a fake trailer for a movie that doesn’t exist, would you like to do a short film?” I said yes, because it made a lot of sense. If we’re going to shoot for two days just for a trailer, we might as well make something a little more long-form.

From start to finish, this was probably less than three months to pull the whole thing together. I started getting ideas right away once they mentioned wanting a gigantic alligator. Dave is such a fun character. Muna was a new character for In the Jungle. They gave me a list of characters and said, “We’d like to include Bancho, Cobra and Dr. Bacon, and then you can pick from some of these other characters featured in the new game.”

I immediately thought Muna was fun. She’s this crazy character. In one trailer, they had her playing on the computer maniacally. At that point I thought, “She’s got to take electric eels and jam them into the alligator to try to stop it.” That was the first thing I got from seeing that. Sasha Burrow, our visual effects supervisor at The Asylum, is amazing. We’d worked with him on multiple projects, and he was also a fan of Dave the Diver. We banded together and reverse-engineered everything.

Once I knew what I wanted to do with the story, we pitched it to Mintrocket and created storyboards and animatics to get approval. The big thing when you’re dealing with an IP is being respectful of what it is. You have to make sure you don’t do things that disrupt what they want. I can’t suddenly decide Cobra is a staff photographer for The Daily Bugle. That’s not going to work. It became a wonderful collaborative process. They were incredibly generous and willing to try things. It was weird, but it fit with the tapestry they were creating for In the Jungle.

DEADLINE: There’s such an intimate vibe to the film that feels fun, and the costume design is cute.

FERRANTE: Yeah, we created all these underwater sequences on a low budget, and it was exciting. That’s the fun part of doing these things. We definitely have an indie spirit. There’s a handmade quality when you have to wear a lot of hats. I think that’s what Dave is. It’s handmade. It was a small group of people working directly with Mintrocket. We’d get approval on things and that’s how it came to life. One of the most important things for them, beyond respecting the characters, was the look. Gabriela Aceves did the makeup and Christy Haupman handled costumes. We did a lot of prep to get the look right. If you look at Cobra, Christy hand-dyed those pants to match the exact shade of green from the game. She nailed it. I remember saying to her, “You’re going to have a hard time figuring out these pants.” She said, “Just let me show you.” The next day she came in, and it was perfect. I was like, “How did you dye this overnight?” It was spot-on. [Laughs]. 

DEADLINE: What was the tone you were trying to get across with Dave? 

FERRANTE: With Dave, it was about figuring out the tone. Once I understood that initial game trailer, they released a few weeks before we started, I really understood what they were going for. Sharknado was played straight, but the comedy came from the absurd situations, and I like that rhythm. We’ll get to casting in a minute because our casting director did a great job, but I tend to cast actors who aren’t afraid to color outside the lines. If something comes up on set, I can throw something at them, and they can run with it.

When you think about ’90s comedies, there’s a lot of ad-libbing, and that’s what makes them funny. You can write funny material, but the moments that happen organically are often the best. One of my favorite lines came during the character introductions. Vivian True, who played Muna, came up with the whole “Stop flirting with me” bit. To me, that’s funny because Dave is just being innocent and she’s reading something completely different into it. That’s the kind of thing that came out in the moment. Most of it was scripted, but there were little moments like Panutah saying “nuts” when the alligator starts eating a villager. That deadpan delivery works.

When I say handmade, a lot of that also happened in the edit. I edited the short myself. The places where the music cuts out, the pacing, the rhythm those are all part of creating the comedy.

DEADLINE: Let’s talk about casting. 

FERRANTE: Tessa Johnson is the casting director I work with all the time. She deserves a lot of credit because she always finds amazing people. There have been projects where we needed fresh faces or had to cast locally in another state, and suddenly she finds someone incredible who becomes one of my favorite actors to work with. The tricky part here was that we didn’t have a script when we started casting. In the auditions, we told people to ad-lib. We gave them a description of the character and asked them to perform as that character. It was a very different casting process. We also didn’t tell people it was Dave the Diver. We changed the character names. Muna became Mary, Dave became Brian, things like that. We got a great group of people auditioning, and a lot of them were faces we’d never seen before.

Steven really captured Dave. He looked like him, and he’s a huge fan of Dave the Diver, so even though we were trying to hide what the project was, he kind of knew it was Dave the Diver. Kofi Baffour, who plays Bancho, had previously worked with me on a TV project where he played a very serious role. To see him step into this charming sushi chef character, he absolutely nailed it. Steve Falcone, who plays Cobra, was another great find. We needed someone who was muscular and had that chiseled-jaw action-hero look. But it’s never just about appearance. The question is whether they can perform and bring something extra to the role. Steve has a lot of funny moments. There’s a confidence to Cobra, but it never comes across as arrogant. It’s more of a charming cockiness. And he loves Dave. They all love Dave, but they understand that Dave just wants to dive and catch fish.

Then there’s Vivian True as Muna. I’d never met her before, but from the moment she auditioned, she was hilarious. She immediately stood out. We took our finalists and presented them to Mintrocket. We gave them several options and talked through each actor. We were pretty much all in agreement from the start, and they were very happy with the casting choices. We really lucked out because every single person who came in brought something unique.

G. Anthony Joseph, who plays Panutah, was someone I knew peripherally from other projects at The Asylum. When he came in, he just got it. He understood the gravitas the character needed, but he was also funny. There were things you could throw at him on set, and he’d instantly make them better.

DEADLINE: Was there pressure in being the first to usher these characters into being? One person’s version of Dave, for example, is probably vastly different from another person’s Dave.

FERRANTE: Not really. I get excited by challenges. I’ve done bigger projects, smaller projects. I just enjoy doing things I haven’t done before. I adapted another game property about 12 years ago called Hello Hero, so I had a little experience working with existing IP. The real pressure was time. I would’ve loved a week-long shoot. I would’ve loved more coverage and more time to perfect everything. But when you look at something like Sharknado, people assume we intentionally made certain choices. What they don’t realize is that those movies were basically produced like television. We had 18 days to shoot each one. The final movie had around 1,200 visual effects shots that our artists completed in six weeks. We did the impossible.

What I love about that is we find a way to make the impossible possible, and in the end, you’re trying to create something people enjoy. That’s the challenge with Dave. Can we get it right? Can we make Mintrocket happy? The bigger pressure is always wondering how audiences will respond. The response has been incredible. People love the actors. They love the casting. They love that it looks like a real movie trailer. Every person who worked on this from the crew to post-production, prep, and everyone at The Asylum and Mintrocket helped make that happen. I also think we’re reaching a point where audiences are responding to handmade, handcrafted work again.

You could’ve done a giant studio version of this, but when you look at projects like Backrooms, Iron Lung and others coming from creators who started on YouTube, audiences are connecting with them. They’re handcrafted. When those creators finally get budgets, they’re still bringing that same aesthetic because they’ve worn all those different hats themselves. People respond to it because it doesn’t feel overdeveloped. I’m not saying studio movies are bad. There are great studio movies. What I’m talking about is having a strong point of view. A unique voice.

It proves you don’t need a $200 million budget to break through. You can make an independent film and still connect with people. I think that’s what we’d all like to see more of.

DEADLINE: Where did you film this? 

FERRANTE: We filmed this in Los Angeles at an amazing location near Woodland Hills called The Last Outpost.At first we were trying to figure out how to create a jungle in Southern California. We looked at places like arboretums, but once we started pricing everything out, it became cost-prohibitive. Then I remembered The Last Outpost. I’d filmed there before, and Lynne Castillo, who runs the location, has always been incredibly welcoming. I thought, “Let’s put some of the budget into greenery.” Luckily, when we shot there, everything was still fairly green. Southern California can get very dry, but we caught it at the right time. We brought in palm fronds and kept moving them around. You’ll probably see the same palm fronds in multiple shots, but we’d reposition them in the foreground to create the illusion of different jungle environments.

We had one area for the dense jungle scenes and another for the wider village scenes. Our production designer, Brad Ashton, couldn’t build an entire village. That simply wasn’t possible with our schedule or budget. But he built one hut, and everything else was created digitally. We also wanted to build a diving platform, but again, time became the issue. So we built it on stage the next day and shot it against a green screen. That’s filmmaking sometimes. The location ended up giving us everything we needed.

DEADLINE: What’s next for you? 

FERRANTE: I shot a movie in Massachusetts last summer called Water Park Shark. I always seem to get pulled into shark movies. With this one though, I wanted to do something closer to Caddyshack with sharks. We had a great cast, including David Chokachi, Matthew Dame and Chelsea Gilson. We filmed at a water park before it opened for the season, so we had a very limited window and had to move fast. It’s coming out July 3 on Apple TV, Prime Video and Fandango at Home.

The other project I’m really proud of is called Moonlight Hustle. The star of Water Park Shark, Matthew Dame and Michael Shaun Sandy who I’d worked with previously came to me with this script Matt had written. It was called Moonlight Hustle, and it felt like an homage to the crime thrillers of the late ’90s and early 2000s. It had shades of films like Pulp Fiction, but it also had its own unique point of view. Matt said, “I’m going to raise the money for this.” I said, “OK, let’s make it happen.” He raised the financing, and we shot it in Miami and the Fort Lauderdale area last November. One of the things that was exciting about that project was that we actually had enough time to shoot it. That’s not always the case with independent films. We had time to play. We had time to design shots. We used Steadicam. We were able to experiment with different styles.The film has heart, humor and crime elements, and I’m really proud of it. I can’t wait for people to see it, either late this year or early 2027. 

Dave the Diver: In the Jungle is available now on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S.