The Bench is heavily inspired by the Twilight Zone and tries to pay homage to the legacy of the show. The Twilight Zone book Ethan is holding in the beginning is actually a real book that belongs to the actor himself.
The Bench was filmed in about four and a half hours with only a two-person crew, including a student intern whose first time on a production set was this short film.
The girl that appears on the bench at the end of the film is also the production student intern that assisted with boom audio and camera for the film.
The Bench aims to propose three main questions; Would you want to know how much time you have left to live, what would you do with the time you have remaining, and if you knew when someone was going to die, would you tell them. The film purposely does not attempt to answer any of those questions, rather, each one is left open for the viewer to subconsciously answer on their own.
The original title of the film was "Happy Birthday" and included a line of dialogue where Ethan sarcastically says "happy birthday" to Russell for giving him some valuable information about his prognosis. The line was supposed to be delivered in a comical way as a type of funny final exchange between the characters, but the Director forgot to film that section of the script, so it never made it into the final edit, hence leading to the film title change.
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