DM: So what was the first step towards making a story about girls being locked up?

P: We needed to go work with young girls that were locked up. So we out fifty letters all over to various juvenile detention centers, and one center responded. So we met with them, we sat down and told them we wanted to make a film and write a film them but in order to d that we needed to work with their young women and we wanted to do a theater workshop with them.

They let us into their facility three times a week, for three months and we did everything with these beautiful young women. We had theatre games, writing games, painting games, and dancing games and they really just opened up their lives to us and it was a beautiful experience because at the end of that day you saw A) that they were still kids and they were locked up and B) they were good people, beautiful people, they were just in some fucked up circumstances.

DM: How did that lead into the writing of the script?

P: After those three months we spent with the girls, during that time Lori, Michael and myself, we would go back to the office and talk about the film, and talk about the story and trying to figure out who our characters were. We realized we had three characters that we were going to tell, and we went into a detailed outline about each girl’s story and each girl’s personality. We knew the characters very well and we cast the film. Then we went into a six-week rehearsal process with actors - five times a week, five hours a day and actors improvised the scenes, and we recorded those scenes. Based off the improvisations Lori would go back and watch the film and type out a script for us. It was a different process from how film is usually made.

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