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Playing a character in a film who dies by suicide, adapted from a book penned by a famed author who met the same fate, is already a heady experience. But for Liev Schreiber, who tackles the stoically heroic Colonel Richard Cantwell in the big screen version of Ernest Hemingway’s final full-length novel, “Across the River and Into the Trees,” life imitated art — which imitated life — in ways not even Schreiber could have expected.

“One of the things that happened to us in this epic, long shoot [in Venice, Italy] is that my father had found a sarcoma on his leg — a very, very rapid [growing] one,” Schreiber told a crowd gathered for a special screening and premiere of the film, directed by Paula Ortiz, at the Sun Valley Film Festival Thursday night.

“We only had a month left to shoot,” he continued, “and the crew graciously stopped the film and let me go home to Seattle,...