Of gun violence in America, the film's director Tony Garnett has said in an interview with Matthew Edwards of the 'Cinema-Retro' website: ''The place of guns is deeply embedded in American history. As I made clear in the classroom, America is built on genocide, has a macho culture and confuses owning guns with individual freedoms. This will take some shifting. It was all part of my attempt to understand America.''
The picture's US $3 million budget cost was financed by UK production house EMI Films. Director Tony Garnett said in an interview with Matthew Edwards of the 'Cinema-Retro' website: ''The budget was small, around [US] $3 m[illion], and my agent Harry Ufland set it up at EMI without difficulty. I had no interference from them, until the rough cut and then everyone wanted to improve the film.''
Initially, filmmaker Tony Garnett had recently moved from the UK to the USA whereupon he wanted to make a movie about the nation's culture of gun violence.
Of setting the film in Texas, with its frontier attitude and obsession with guns, director Tony Garnett said in an interview with Matthew Edwards of the 'Cinema-Retro' website: ''Texas has a frontier attitude, there are more guns there than people and the attitude to women tends to be courtly even as they are commodified. I had to choose somewhere and could have set it anywhere, in truth. But Dallas seemed right at the time.''
The cast members who played the parents of Kathleen Sullivan were found in Boston, Massachusetts, USA by the film's director Tony Garnett. In the film's story, Kathleen Sullivan (Karen Young), according to show-business trade-paper 'Variety', ''...goes to the mid-west to teach history after a protected Catholic upbringing in Boston.''