Independent genre films rarely die on the page. They die in pre-production, with sets half-built and one indispensable role still empty. That is where Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room stood when Patrick Stewart, an actor whose career ran from the Royal Shakespeare Company to Star Trek: The Next Generation and the X-Men films, decided he wanted to play a neo-Nazi club owner in a backwoods punk thriller. In the director’s telling, that single yes is the reason the film exists at all.

Saulnier told the story while introducing an anniversary screening of the film in Los Angeles, days after Stewart’s death, as The Hollywood Reporter first reported. Production, he said, was “at the point of no return, building sets, and under the gun without Darcy”: Darcy Banker, the soft-spoken owner of the white-power venue where a touring band witnesses a murder and is trapped backstage. “We were close to shutting down,” Saulnier recalled, until Stewart, “out of the blue, sort of expressed interest in the project.”

About a week later the director was on the phone with him. “This dude came out of nowhere, from way above our sort of zone, and just swooped down, nosedived into our cruddy ass movie and saved us, and said yes,” he said. “And the movie was instantly greenlit.” It is the oldest lever in independent financing made unusually visible: a name with worldwide recognition turns a fragile package into a fundable one, and a production on the edge of being dismantled goes ahead.

Saulnier, who has since directed Hold the Dark and Rebel Ridge for Netflix, described Stewart as a “true gentleman” and a “very kind leader to our whole cast,” a cast that included Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat and Macon Blair. He also remembered the actor asking to add “a little something” to one scene: a single expletive, delivered as the camera moved through. “Permission granted, sir,” Saulnier answered. To him, the request proved that Stewart was “completely aligned with the film, its aesthetic, its intentions and with me as a filmmaker.”

Green Room premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2015, two years after Saulnier’s Blue Ruin launched from the same section, and A24 released it in US theaters in April 2016. Stewart died at his home in Los Angeles at 86, following what his longtime spokesperson Kelly Bush Novak called “a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia.” Ian McKellen, Hugh Jackman, William Shatner and Halle Berry were among those who paid tribute. Saulnier admitted he had come to the screening to promote his next film, Slayground, an A24 horror thriller set in a haunted attraction and scheduled for January 29, 2027.

“Patrick Stewart is why I still can make movies,” Saulnier said. The next test of that sentence is Slayground itself, which returns him to A24, the company that put Green Room in theaters a decade ago because one actor from far above its budget line picked up the phone.