'This will happen come hell or high water.'

PEACHAM, VT. - A conspiracy of minor inconveniences and deal-breaking disasters nearly kept Jay Craven’s new film, “Disappearances,” from being made: Mud instead of snow. Thousands of feet of wrecked film. A $100,000 investor who backed out at the 11th hour. A lead actor with a bum knee.

But like the story’s foolhardy and inextinguishable lead character, Quebec Bill, Craven’s film recklessly survived to see the light of day and illuminate the dark of movie theaters.

On Friday , the Vermont born-and-bred "Disappearances" kicks off its national tour with a weeklong run at the Brattle Theatre. Craven and novelist Howard Frank Mosher will be on hand to introduce the film and answer questions. Leading up to this day was a six-year odyssey marked by both determination and heartache.

"I came to a position, as I have with all my films," says writer, director, and producer Craven . " 'This will happen come hell or high water.' "

Cobbling together financing for indie films is nothing new for Craven, who also shot the dramatic features "Where the Rivers Flow North" (1993) and " A Stranger in the Kingdom" (1997) in his native Northeast Kingdom, the sparsely populated hill country north of St. Johnsbury.

But with "Disappearances," the final film of Craven's trilogy based on novels by Mosher, troubles seemed to plague it from the get-go.

Central to the ultimate survival of "Disappearances" was Kris Kristofferson, who fell in love with the lead character and jumped on board back in 2000. Kristofferson told Craven the story was "the Peckinpah script that got away."

The film's loose coming-of-age story concerns a father, Quebec Bill (played by Kristofferson), initiating his son, Wild Bill (15-year-old Charlie McDermott) into the perils of adult life during a Depression-era, whiskey-running adventure. Craven, a fan of Buñuel and Fellini, wove strands of a "revisionist north country western" with a magical realist ghost story.

"It had the quality of an old folk ballad," Kristofferson says in the behind-the-scenes short film "Act of Faith: The Making of ' Disappearances ' ," available from kingdomcounty.com. "Half of it's magic. Half of it's real."

Kristofferson's participation helped attract co-stars like William Sanderson ("Deadwood"), Genevieve Bujold ("King of Hearts"), Gary Farmer ("Smoke Signals"), and Luis Guzman ("Boogie Nights"). All the actors worked for scale -- that's $1,620 a week. No exceptions. No divas allowed.

When Bujold saw Craven's "Where the Rivers Flow North," she was sold. "He has that feel for filmmaking, nature, the music he uses, and his tempo," says Bujold, via phone from Malibu, Calif. "I thought, ' That's it. This man respects actors, he has a vision and is smart. ' And yes, I got on board."

Her character, Cordelia, an enigmatic figure for whom "reality and illusion are interchangeable," guides Wild Bill through his journey. "[The part] was so well written," Bujold says. "The way I read and the way I read my life, I knew her."

Yet the cast's enthusiasm -- even a rare production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts -- didn't guarantee a green light. Craven, Kristofferson, and everyone else in the production had to wait six years before the planets aligned and the minuscule $1.2 million budget was secured.

Then, as if "Disappearances" had been cursed, Craven -- not to be confused with Wes Craven, the director behind "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Scream" -- found himself trapped in production hell.

The topper: A week before the 25-day shoot began in April, 2005, an investor failed to come through with $100,000.

"We were wrangling $10,000 loans here and there," Craven remembers. "It was a massive juggling act." Craven mortgaged his and wife Bess O'Brien's house to keep the payroll going.

Snafus -- or hauntings -- continued on the set. Craven shot for three days with film stock that, unknown to him, had been damaged by an airport X-ray machine in transit from Kodak. He had to reshoot. Worse, 11,000 feet of film inexplicably became scratched. Fixing it digitally put the film $130,000 over budget.

"$1.2 [million] became $1.7," Craven says. No small sum when dealing with ultra-low thresholds like these.

But adversity breeds community. With an injured knee from a stunt gone awry, and still reeling from the recent death of his sister, the gravel l y voiced Kristofferson agreed to perform a benefit concert in Vermont -- after a six-day shooting week -- that raised some $30,000. A year later he returned to Vermont, performing for the premier e and raising another $40,000.

"He went the extra mile," says Craven. "I can't imagine anyone else would have done it."

Except, naturally, the crew. Despite the low pay and extreme conditions -- like shooting at "four o'clock in the morning on a frozen lake," says production designer Carl Sprague -- the film attracted personnel from as far away as Boston.

"We shot in March into April, mud season in Vermont," says the Berkshires-based Sprague, who has worked on films ranging from "The Royal Tenenbaums" to "State and Main." "People [came] just because the project was aesthetically exciting." Sprague even lent some of his own money to the production.

"I find Jay's projects amazing, they're so homegrown, he reminds me of my early days working in the theater," says Gary Farmer by phone from his art gallery in Santa Fe, N.M. "He's probably got at least 200 funders on this film. That's just unheard of. You can't make the kind of films Jay makes otherwise."

Farmer, the self-proclaimed "king of low budget" who plays Kristofferson's booze-smuggling partner, Henry Coville, says he'd "bend over backward" to help Craven out. "This business is not often enough like that."

Part of Craven's credo is to build on local talent and local investors. His films' fates are also inextricably stitched to local audiences. In the age of Netflix and Blockbuster, and cineplexes booked solid with, as Craven puts it, "cars, pirates, supermen, and snakes on a plane," Craven's solution to reaching Vermonters was to bypass typical venues and present directly to the farmers, loggers, and factory workers who wouldn't normally be exposed to an independent film.

His "100 Town Tour" last summer screened "Disappearances" in town halls, church basements, high school gymnasiums, and opera houses. Students at Marlboro College, where Craven teaches film, dragged a portable AV system up and down the state, from Derby Line to Brattleboro. The tour grossed $170,000 and reached 18,500 people. Best of all, Craven's Kingdom County Productions reaped most of the financial rewards.

"The idea [is] to act on a populist impulse and be inclusive but go beyond what [the audience] is used to," Craven says. "Filmmaking for me is about community and family."

The former arts center director-turned filmmaker is adept at leveraging connections and getting people fired up about his projects. On the phone, he freely switches among roles as filmmaker, fund-raiser, and cheerleader.

"What's the possibility of 'Disappearances' in West Newton?" Craven, 56, says to a Boston-based theater booking agent. Wearing a headset, his gray mane tucked under a baseball cap, Craven mans the helm of his hilltop production office -- a modest house hundreds of miles from the centers of mainstream filmmaking. He reminds the booker of his past successes. "['Where the Rivers Flow North'] played for eight weeks. We're about to do a mailing to 3,000 people [in Boston]."

Craven still considers himself an activist -- though no longer fighting for the antiwar and social justice causes of his college days so much as for the survival of homegrown and singular movies.

"Will I make a next film? Who knows?" Craven muses, his gaze taking in the view out his window. Mount Washington glistens, rosily, in the afternoon distance. "You make every film like it will be your last."

Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.