When Mara plays a song on the diner jukebox she enters C 4. (A common variety of the plastic explosive)
Being filmed at Thomas Haney Secondary School in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada.
In a 2020 interview with Looper, Brian Duffield spoke about the film's varied influences: "Sufjan Stevens' album Carrie & Lowell was really huge for me, because he wrote it about his parents, and death is part of it, but it's also really funny, and just gorgeous. I listened to it on loop, basically, and the movie ends with a song from it. So that was really a big touchstone, because it's a movie about grief but it's not supposed to be depressing, which was an interesting tonal challenge. Like, how could we have a movie where people are dying and we're taking it seriously but keeping it on a lighter tone?
It's funny, I see my dog a lot in the movie, which is a weird one. I have a little Jack Russell mixed mutt, and whenever she's tired or scared, she'll go under the bed. And in my nerdy dog-owner life, I learned that's because animals do that because they want to feel secure enough that a predator can't flip them over and eat their belly. So that made its way into the movie. And there are other things that Mara does that are inspired by my dog, which is really bizarre. But I was like, 'When my dog is scared, she does this self-protection, cocoon kind of thing.' And visually I thought that was really interesting, and it became a chunk of Mara's experience in the movie.
And I'll say Heathers (1988) too, just because it's Heathers. I love Heathers, but it treats death a little sillier. And I don't mean that in a negative way. It's incredible what they do in that movie. But I really wanted the characters that die in Spontaneous... you see their parents are upset. People are upset."