Always wanting it to be a ensemble film, I decided to base all the characters loosely on Peanuts characters. I spent the next three years working on the script. In the meantime I moved to Portland, or from my native Maryland. Portland was the perfect town to make the film, and I slowly started to work on local films and commercials to get some experience and meet people interested in making films. Partly I had grown sick of the cheap violence that passes for independent film, but I was also conscious of the limitations of my directing and the actors I was likely to get.
Hardcore drama is tough.
I had always wondered why high schools never do rad plays like A Long Day's Journey Into Night , but in retrospect, I'm glad they don't. Around the fall of 1997, I couldn't take it anymore. I didn't really have a great script, but I needed to make the film. I had been talking so much shit about this film I was going to make, I was afraid people were beginning to tire of my armchair filmmaker persona. Thinking things would work themselves out, I set a date, the next spring, and figured I would have to get the script done in time.