In an interview, the director said: "We finished the script for 13 Conversations in eight weeks--it was finished before Clockwatchers actually came out. What happened was I had to do a lot of traveling with Clockwatchers to festivals and we actually won a prize at the Turin Festival. Thankfully, it was a cash prize, about $18,000, and we took that money and worked on 13 Conversations. But right after Clockwatchers we actually went back to doing temp work and trying to raise funding to make our next movie, and suddenly it's three-and-a-half years later. We took odd jobs, used credit cards--we kept thinking that big break was just right around the corner. I think we would've walked away from it altogether, but periodically something encouraging would happen to keep us going."
During this film's screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, Matthew McConaughey saved a woman's life after she suffered a seizure. Coincidentally, this happened right after the line "Why do you want to be a doctor?"
The director and writer state that many characters smoked randomly in order to help them get an R rating, which they wanted so it would do better. (Seriously, they say this in the DVD commentary.)
Roger Ebert wrote in his 4-star review: "The film was directed by Jill Sprecher and written with her sister, Karen. It's their second, after "Clockwatchers" (1997), the lacerating, funny story about temporary workers in an office and their strategies to prove they exist in a world that is utterly indifferent to them. After these two movies, there aren't many filmmakers whose next film I anticipate more eagerly. " - It unfortunately took ten years before they released another film.