“Rain in the Mountains” is a movie that almost never made it out of production. Several weeks into filming, our lead actor, Steve Pierre, suffered a debilitating stroke that left him paralyzed and unable to speak. We rushed him to the hospital, and things started to look very grim. Thankfully, Steve started to slowly get better, but we knew there was no way he could finish the movie. We still had a huge chunk of the script left to shoot, and his character was supposed to be in almost every scene we had left. The realization that we might not be able to finish the movie hit me hard, and I think that realization hit Steve even harder.

Everybody was determined to find a way to finish the film. Bringing my laptop with me to the hospital while we were waiting to visit Steve, I began to rack my brain and everybody else’s for ways to rewrite the rest of the movie without his character. The hospital didn’t have a waiting room on Steve’s floor, so we were all sitting in the children’s playroom in tiny chairs surrounded by toys and children’s books. Eventually, we created a new version of the script. A lot of scenes were drastically changed. A few scenes were dropped, and a few new scenes were added. We must have done a fairly good on-the-fly patch job because most people can’t tell which scenes were altered or added (or even when we had stand-ins play Steve’s part). I still wish we had had the opportunity to shoot the entire script as it was intended, but I’m also incredibly grateful that we were able to finish the film at all; and I’m definitely proud of the final product we created.