Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane forge an unlikely friendship in 'Between the Temples'

Carol Kane’s name came to filmmaker Nathan Silver in a fever dream. He’d come down with a case of COVID-19 while trying to get his new film together. The story he and co-writer C.

Mason Wells envisioned was about an unlikely friendship between a recently widowed cantor in a depressive funk and an older woman, his former grade school music teacher, who wants to study for a bat mitzvah. Ben, the cantor who can no longer sing, would be Jason Schwartzman. Carla, who was based on the filmmaker’s own mother, was more of an enigma.

And then came a fit of inspiration in that fateful, feverish sleep. “Everyone was like, ‘of course it’s her,’” Silver said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. Though the two actors had never worked together before (“In my mind we had,” Kane laughed), they had an immediate rapport and comfort with one another – transcending even the awkward stillness of a group Zoom session.

And that was when he knew they really had a movie. “I had such a feeling about Jason,” said Kane. “We had such a trust in each other.

Lord knows why, but we did. That made it possible. It made it, dare I say, almost easy because it was sort of natural to talk to each other.

” “ Between the Temples ” opens in theaters this week. A breakout from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Sony Pictures Classics swooped in to acquire the distribution rights after it received near-universal praise for its performances and its unique tone and style: A.