Hollywood veterans dish on new locally shot independent film premiering in CT

“A Stage of Twilight,” a new independent film shot in New Milford, will have its first Connecticut screening on Thursday at the Bantam Cinema & Arts Center in Bantam.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with the film’s co-star, William Sadler, its writer/director Sarah Schwab and its main producer Brian Long.

Tickets are $12.50, $10.50 for students and seniors and military and $8.50 for children.

Much of the film was shot at two New Milford farms, Finnegan’s Farm West and Kimberly Farms. The drama is set on a dairy farm and many cows are featured in the outdoor scenes.

“I grew up working on a dairy farm myself, but a lot of the cast and crew hadn’t,” Schwab said.

Besides Sadler, whose best-known film and TV roles have included Death in two of the “Bill & Ted” films, S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Matthew Ellis in the Marvel Universe and Luther Sloan in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” the movie also stars Karen Allen of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Animal House” fame.

Allen has been involved with every stage of development for “A Stage of Twilight,” from its origins as a stage play to its Connecticut-made film.

“I came to Karen with the first draft to ask her to direct it, but when she read it she asked if she could have a chance to play the role of Cora,” Schwab said.

The play had readings or productions in New York, Vermont and Massachusetts with Allen starring and different actors playing Barry, but the COVID shutdown scuppered its further development. “I decided to turn it into a screenplay,” Schwab said.

When Jeffrey DeMunn, who had been in the stage version, was unable to make the film because he was doing in the series “Billions,” Sadler was suggested by a friend of Allen’s and turned out to be an ideal choice. “He hasn’t really done something like this before,” Schwab said, “but we just got each other.”

Long, the film’s director, also has a theater background. He was the managing director of the Rattlestick Theater, a small off-Broadway theater that has worked with New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre, for nine years and produced shows at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York.

The play version of “A Stage of Twilight” had three characters and one set. The movie has multiple Connecticut locations and a cast of 15, though it is mostly about Allen and Sadler’s characters. They play Cora and Barry, a couple that has been together for 40 years. Barry finds out that he has a terminal illness and decides to move off to a cabin by a lake hours from their home to save Cora from what he sees as the unnecessary trouble of having to care for him in his dying days. She sees the situation differently and wants to help.

The film opens with shots of farmland, livestock and a barn cat drinking from a water cooler. The scene then shifts to a public library where Allen and Sadler have a cute romantic moment. We then see them in a restaurant. The movie is just in its first two minutes and has already shown several sides of Litchfield County.

“A Stage of Twilight” is rather ambiguous about where it is set, and the characters mention several locations in New York state.

Long explained how “A Stage of Twilight” came to be made in Connecticut. “One of our producers was involved with the Ridgefield Film Festival,” he said. “We let her drive around looking for the best place to film it. She came back and said New Milford had everything we needed. It was an easy fit.

When you’re doing a film, you really interact with the community,” Long continued. “There’s housing, catering, prop support like cars and artwork, police support. … We even had the fire department involved.”

New Milford was such an ideal shooting location that it even unexpectedly delivered one of the film’s essential props: The car in which Cora tools around town, the car she uses to bring the farmhand Joey (who’s become like a son to Cora and Barry) to visit a college he’s applied to.

“I was staying at 34 Main St. with our production designer,” Schwab said, “and we’re still looking for what we call a ‘hero car’ for Karen. We were looking out the window and parked across the street was the perfect car. We wrote a note, left it on the windshield and sat there waiting. It’s two days before the shoot. We saw the owner find the note. It was a few hours later, but she eventually did call and we were able to use the car. It just felt very country-simplistic. It’s in the movie a lot.”

Both Schwab and Long will be doing more live theater projects in the future but for now, they are concentrating on their film company Cardinal Flix. Besides “A Stage of Twilight,” Cardinal Flix made the 2019 short “A My Name Is,” the 2022 feature “Life After You” and the forthcoming feature “Crybaby Bridge.”

“A Stage of Twilight” has been on the festival circuit for months and has just started doing theatrical screenings. The film look to be released to online streaming services on April 26.