After she had written the script, Sofia Coppola was heartbroken to discover that another company was already producing an adaptation of the book themselves. However, they were not happy with their script, so she showed them hers and they ended up using it instead.
Thurston Moore of the band Sonic Youth originally gave the book to Sofia Coppola. After reading it, she decided to make it into a movie.
Coppola was inspired to write the film after reading the source novel: "I really didn't know I wanted to be a director until I read The Virgin Suicides and saw so clearly how it had to be done," she said. "I immediately saw the central story as being about what distance and time and memory do to you, and about the extraordinary power of the unfathomable."
For the part of Lux, Coppola auditioned numerous actresses, but had a "gut choice" of Kirsten Dunst, who was sixteen years old at the time of her casting. Reflecting on the role, Dunst said: "I was nervous. It was my first role that was more of a 'sexy' thing. I was also unsure about how large the role was gonna be, because a lot of it was without dialogue. When I met Sofia, I immediately knew that she would handle it in a delicate way... [she] really brought out the luminous aspect of the girls; she made them like ethereal angels, almost like they weren't really there."
After seeing her in the movie Manny & Lo (1996), Sofia Coppola offered Scarlett Johansson a role in the film. Johansson, however, considered the script to be "too intense" and turned it down. Johansson would star in Coppola's next film, Lost in Translation (2003).