The Making of Disciples in the Moonlight Was Almost as Thrilling as the Movie Itself

The story on screen is about ordinary believers facing the impossible. Behind the camera, the filmmakers faced a few impossible moments of their own.

When people hear the words “Bible movie,” they may picture something slow, predictable, or overly sanitized.

Disciples in the Moonlight is none of those things. And that’s by design.

When director and lead actor Brett Varvel first encountered the story, the action and suspense certainly caught his attention. In this pivotal film about ordinary believers risking everything to smuggle Bibles across a future America where Scripture has been outlawed, there’s danger, pursuit, impossible choices, and plenty of suspense—everything a good thriller is made of.

But that wasn’t ultimately what made him say yes.

What stayed with him was a much harder question: “How would I respond?”

That question became the heartbeat of the project. Varvel wanted audiences to feel the stakes of the story—the possibility of living in a time when the Bible was illegal—rather than simply observe them from a distance.

But believe it or not, the most thrilling part may be what happened behind the camera.

The Waiting Game

Varvel has said the movie spent nearly a decade in development before finally moving into production. First, there was the issue of finding funding for the film. And then finding the right kind of investors—people whose motivation went beyond simply making money.

That’s why, looking back, Varvel believes God wasn’t simply delaying the film—He was preparing the right people at the right time.

As Varvel put it, society has a “very fast-food mentality” about life. But God doesn’t necessarily work on our timetable.

“I believe, you know, again, not just from the refining that he was doing in my heart over the course of those years, but preparing the artists that were going to be a part of this project that I didn’t know yet and would not have known if we were successful in 2015,” he explained.

That realization hit him especially hard on his first day on set. It was the first time Varvel saw the entire team assembled—the people he had spent years praying would somehow come together.

“I got so emotional because I’m looking in the eyes of people that, I saw God’s hand in bringing them to this project,” he said. “And then seeing creativity and their talent, elevating the story to a whole different level, it was just like this very cool peek behind the curtain for me to see what God was doing.”

After seven years of waiting, Disciples in the Moonlight was finally moving forward.

But getting the movie into production didn’t mean the challenges were over.

The Location That Disappeared

On day three of filming, Varvel got a reminder that getting this film made would require plenty of faith—and a lot of flexibility.

The team was filming an intense argument scene when he noticed several of his producers talking nearby. They didn’t look happy.

Then came the news: the location they were supposed to use the next day was gone.

The production had planned to spend the entire night filming inside a police station, but the location’s lawyers had determined they couldn’t shoot there after all. Crisis mode ensued.  

“Thankfully, we got our team together and people started praying, and we just trusted that the Lord was going to solve this problem for us,” Varvel said. “And after a few phone calls, the Lord directed us to a hallway that was just outside of [the police station] … And sure enough, wouldn’t you know it, that location was way better of a location than what we had actually scouted and prepped and planned beforehand.”

While the scene ended up becoming an important part of the movie, it was also a reminder that there was still so much out of their control.

“Moments like that happened a lot throughout production; being a low-budget independent film, you’re calling on a lot of favors,” Varvel explained. “You’re asking people to go the extra mile and think outside the box, outside the limitations of the budget.”  

And that’s exactly what happened next.

How Do You Light the Moon?

If losing a police-station location wasn’t enough, the production soon faced another problem that was a little more fundamental:

How do you actually light a movie called Disciples in the Moonlight on a small budget? 

From the beginning, Varvel and his cinematography team knew the film would require extensive nighttime exterior scenes. But as a low-budget independent production, they didn’t have the money to recreate the massive nighttime lighting setups a Hollywood production might use.

So they started looking for a solution outside the box. And then one of the producers, Van Lawson, happened to drive past a neighbor’s house.

The neighbor had just started a tree-trimming service. And he had a very big truck. Not just any truck—a vehicle with a gigantic arm and bucket that could reach high into the air.

The production had already looked into renting a lift, but the equipment would have to be hauled from location to location, making an already expensive solution even more costly.

The tree-trimming truck, however, was already on wheels.

“We reached out to this guy’s neighbor and said, ‘Hey, can we rent your truck from you?’… It can get high enough in the sky to give you that, you know, bathed in moonlight look, and it was a fraction of the cost,” Varvel recalled.

And while it certainly makes for a great behind-the-scenes story, for Varvel, it represented something much bigger.

“Those moments of thinking outside the box were just so incredible to see my team take the limitations and not be afraid of the limitations,” he said, “but to press through it and find an even better solution than we could have even dreamt from the beginning.”

The movie needed moonlight. The budget said no. The team found a way.

And they were going to need that same determination again.

17 Nights Until Sunrise

Making a thriller on an independent-film budget required more than creative problem-solving. It required people willing to work long after most of the world had gone to sleep.

Of the film’s 25-day production schedule, 17 days were overnight shoots. Cast and crew regularly worked through the night, often pushing toward sunrise before finally wrapping.

Varvel knew the schedule would be demanding. But what stayed with him wasn’t simply how much the production asked of people—it was how willingly they gave it.

He remembers seeing the cast and crew exhausted, yet still committed to getting the best possible version of the story on screen.

“The thing that was such a blessing to me was the smiles on people’s faces,” Varvel noted. “Four in the morning, six in the morning after, you know, shooting for 10 hours and that they, they were tired, they were exhausted, but they didn’t give up. They were committed.”

For Varvel, that commitment became another unexpected part of the story behind Disciples in the Moonlight.

The production wasn’t simply a group of people showing up to do a job. They had bought into the story and believed in what it could mean for audiences. Some were believers; others weren’t. But they were all united in bringing the story to the screen.

“In moments when it was tempting to compromise with the quality, everybody pushed through that extra mile to get that extra take to make sure it was going to be done right,” Varvel said. “And it shows in the presentation of this movie. And that’s just a testimony to these people who put their heart and soul into this thing.”

The Thrill Behind the Thriller

Disciples in the Moonlight is a story about ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances and choosing to trust God when they don’t know what comes next.

In many ways, making the film required that same kind of resolve.

For years, Varvel waited for the opportunity to make the film. Once production finally began, locations disappeared, budgets forced the team to get creative, and 17 nights of shooting pushed the cast and crew to their limits.

Yet every time the production hit a wall; someone found a way forward.

A missing police station became a better location. A tree-trimming truck became moonlight. Exhausting overnight shoots became a chance for a committed cast and crew to give everything they had to the story.

The film is about what happens when faith is tested. And making it became a test of faith, creativity, and determination in its own right.

Maybe that’s what makes the story behind Disciples in the Moonlight almost as compelling as the movie itself.

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