«I wrote the film right out of film school when I was 23. It's mainly a detective movie, from my point of view. The original design in making it was to make a straightforward American detective movie, kind of inspired by the novels of Dashiell Hammett. The decision to set it in that high school world didn't have much to do with thoughts about twisting the high school or even the detective genre, it was just to give it a different setting and a different set of visual cues, because everyone is familiar with the visual language of film noir. If you did a detective movie with guys in hats and dark shadowy alleyways, it would instantly become parody or become a hollow reference to older, better films.»

«The language was what we did the most work on. A big part of it was just performance wise, figuring out how to attack it. We thought that maybe we'd just try applying a modern, natural style of acting to it and just ignore the fact that it's this very formal type of language, and that didn't work at all. That totally fell completely flat. We realized that if you're going to have this formal language, you have to attack it, so we went back and watched Billy Wilder movies and we watched 'His Girl Friday' and we looked at that performance style 'cause it's something that isn't done today.»