Witchblade Stars Yancy Butler & David Chokachi on Their New Movie Emerald Run

Twenty years after their series debuted on TV, Witchblade stars David Chokachi and Yancy Butler — along with their former co-star Eric Eric Etebari — came back together for Emerald Run, a new movie out in select theaters now and coming soon to streaming video on demand platforms. A blend of a mafia thriller and a spiritual drama, Emerald Run sees a man desperate to provide healthcare for his daughter, who takes a one-time-only job smuggling emeralds for the mob. Once he’s out in the middle of the Mexican desert, though, something goes wrong and it quickly becomes a survival drama, as Chokachi’s John Thomas struggles to avoid armed men on his tail.

The movie is getting generally favorable reviews, and has won a few awards on the festival circuit, but the story behind it could be a movie unto itself. Unfortunately for Chokachi, that movie would be a little bit like The Disaster Artist. Late in the game, Chokachi called Etebari in to direct the film, and writer Marialisa Caruso to do some rewrites, in order to save what at that point appeared like a lost cause. With a little more than half of the movie filmed, the original director had a falling out with Chokachi, and with one of the movie’s financiers. That brought the whole project to a screeching halt, according to the star.

“For three weeks we were out in the Anza-Borrego National Park, which is right near the Salton Sea,” Chokachi explained. “We shot for three weeks there, right before Christmas of 2016. Then we were going to shut down and then pick back up again after Christmas and finish the rest of the movie up in the Pismo Beach area. In between that, after the desert, there was a big falling out with the original director: him and the investor, and him and everyone, basically….He basically took the hard drives and held them hostage up in his cabin in the middle of central California. I think the investor at that point, he was ready to just take his loss, basically.”

That would have been a common enough problem for independent films. If you get deep into production and are faced with the possibility of paying more for lawyers than you budgeted for the movie in the first place, the easy call can be to cut and run. That was not going to work for Chokachi, though, who was in love with the script — and had spent three weeks in the hot sun, running and jumping around in the dirt.

“I was the lead in it, it was a great role, and I did not want this movie to get buried or go to the trashcan. So I lobbied [producer] Anthony Caruso for about a year, and finally he agreed to potentially get it going again, and shoot what was missing,” the actor explained. “Eric and I took the footage, we got an editor — this guy Don Money, who’s amazing — and we edited everything that we already had so we could show Anthony what we were missing and what we needed to do. It was painstaking, hard work. It’s a lot of work to try and edit and then crew up, and then go into pre-production, and then go into production, shoot it, and then assemble the footage from two years ago with the footage that we had just shot.”

Essentially what had happened is that the original director and crew had shot the middle of the movie, which is a fairly intimate story with few characters. What still needed to be shot was a beginning and an end. Marialisa Caruso, who plays Chokachi’s sick teenage daughter in the movie, rewrote some of it and Chokachi and Etebari started calling in favors. The end result is a movie made on a relatively modest budget, which features brief appearances by Michael Pare (Eddie and the Cruisers), Yancy Butler, Chris Mulkey (Castle Rock), John Schneider (Smallville), and Steven Williams (The X-Files), among others.

“I’d do anything for David and Eric,” said Butler, who told ComicBook.com that she had remained friends with the pair since their Witchblade days. “I know that David really was proud of the work that he did in the desert, and really wanted this to come to fruition. And it was Eric’s first foray into directing. I was so proud of Eric; I had no idea he had those skills, and he really does have a lot of skills. They had me for, I think it was three days, we only had Chris Mulkey for one day. So to really get all the stuff that he got and all the coverage that he got was really not an easy feat to say the least.”

The movie is maybe not as overtly religious as many “spiritual films” that have hit the market in recent years, but Butler’s character in particular — the wealthy daughter of a mob boss who berates her fundamentally decent husband for not attending the church that she just pays lip service to — sets those elements up early.

“In the beginning, my character, he doesn’t believe in anything,” Chokachi explained. “His life is upside down, his daughter is sick, and he’s got zero faith in humanity, faith and God or spirituality, whatever it is.”

It is not through his ostensibly-religious family but through the heightened circumstances of the film that Thomas finds himself and his faith, though, a message that Butler particularly liked.

“This guy is questioning his faith the entire time,” Butler said, “[it’s about] the internal journey that he took, and what lines he was willing to morally cross for his family.”

You can find Emerald Run at select theaters now or rent or buy it on digital platforms soon.