“That’s the scene where she’s trying to relive what her husband did,” said director Allison Bagnall. “It’s her way of taking control of what happened.”

“Drift,” a working title, is the story of Rose (Gerwig), who discovers her husband’s affair with her childhood friend. She tracks the paramour to southern Delaware. Just as her pursuit drives her insane with rage, she runs across a listless British traveler, played by Alexander. Their romance is unsustainable, said producer Amy Seimetz, but cathartic for Rose.

“Drift,” which wrapped Dec. 18, also filmed at Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton, Fisherman’s Wharf in Lewes and along Rehoboth Avenue as well as at Broadkill Beach. The tiny production crew lived and worked from a rented home on New Castle Street in Rehoboth.

Bagnall, who wrote the screenplay for indie hit “Buffalo 66,” said she knew of Cape Henlopen from her friend, Lewes resident Darree Palmer.

“I wanted a seaside town in the winter,” she said, “a place that was going to feel kind of emptied-out. There’s something very evocative about a beach town in the winter – it’s very lonely.”

She found her ideal location in Broadkill Beach.

“Broadkill has old-fashioned beach houses,” she said. “Modest cottages, like the way Cape Cod used to be.”

The Cape Region was ideal for shooting, she said, because it offered so many vistas within a small radius. Route 1 offered a creepy, overdeveloped atmosphere, she said, but farmland and rural isolation were only a handful of miles away.

Seimetz said the stillness and tranquility of the wintertime beaches lend an otherworldly calm to the film.

“There’s a real quietness to shooting here,” she said. “The atmosphere helps reflect what the characters are going through.”

Finbar co-owner Mark Grabowski said Bagnall scouted his Rehoboth Beach eatery two months prior to the shoot. Grabowski agreed to donate the space pro bono; in return, Finbar gets the prestige of association.

“We have a super-low budget,” Bagnall said. “We would have liked to pay location fees, but we couldn’t.” Most of the cast and crew, she added, went unpaid.

Bagnall said local businesses were happy to let her crew set up shop.

“People were very open to it,” she said.

“It was very easy to get locations. They were fantastic.”

Indie dramas are hard to make in a recession, she said.

Seimetz said the film’s impending website would list the shooting locations, providing free advertisement. Should “Drift” gather a following, places like Finbar’s could well become a pilgrimage stop.

And there’s a good chance it will – the “Drift” crew boasts impressive resumes.

Gerwig is slated to star opposite Ben Stiller in “Greenberg,” due out in March 2010; Alexander played the younger brother of John Keats in this year’s “Bright Star.”

Mark Schwartzbard, the man behind the camera, also worked on Sacha Baron Cohen’s controversial hits “Bruno” and “Borat.”

Seimetz said “Drift” should be finished sometime next spring and she hopes Cape residents can see it during next year’s Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival.

Bagnall said she hopes the locals enjoy “Drift” – she certainly did.

“So many indie movies are made in, like, Brooklyn,” she said. “I didn’t want to be another indie movie made in New York.”