Amateur Cast: All actors involved, both teens and adults, were unprofessional amateurs at the time. Some, like Chloë Sevigny and Rosario Dawson, have since then become more notable actors. Chloë had, however, been a model and appeared in music videos before.
Blooper: Harmony Korine's brother Avi is credited as playing the kid who gives Jennie drugs in the club. It was actually Harmony himself who played him.
Breakaway Pop Hit: The Folk Implosion had a surprise radio hit with the song "Natural One", which was released on this film's soundtrack (though it never appeared in the movie itself).
Chloë Sevigny was 19 playing the 13-year-old Jennie. The actress she replaced (see below) was the same age.
The 12-year-old Telly sleeps with in his opening scene is played by Sarah Henderson, who was 17. For obvious reasons, casting an older actress in this role was necessary.
Executive Meddling: British censors ordered 40 seconds to be removed from the scene where a boy wakes up on a couch to find Jenny being raped by Casper from several feet away.
God Never Said That: Due to the faux-documentary style and the party scenes being unscripted, it's often assumed that the entire film was. Harmony Korine has said that the film was almost entirely scripted.
Hostility on the Set: Justin Pierce, who played Casper, was homeless at the time and had been doing drugs, so he was unprepared for the structure of a film set. One night, there was an incident where he was caught stealing liquor bottles from a nightclub and assaulted by bouncers. Larry Clark apparently pulled him away and yelled, "You're not going to fuck up my movie!"
Romance on the Set: Harmony Korine and Chloë Sevigny dated at the time of production.
Science Marches On: The Downer Ending which sees five characters contracting HIV was bleak then and bleak now, but when the movie was filmed and released, HIV/AIDS was truly a death sentence. By the late 1990snote Hell, as early as a few months after the movie came out, given how the first truly effective medicine, HAART, came in November of 1995, so the characters would, in hindsight, be able to live much longer lives, new treatments were made to greatly prolong the lifespan and increase quality of life for HIV+ people and even people with AIDS.
Throw It In!: The party scenes were unscripted. As soon as the camera rolled, the teens just got drunk or high and played around.
The cast was decided before financing was secured, made up of many of Harmony Korine's friends (who had inspired the characters). In the year it took to acquire funding, most of them had either aged too much for their roles or were just replaced.
None other than a pre-fame Mia Kirshner was cast as Jennie, but dropped two days before filming began. Chloë Sevigny — who at this point had been in a small role as one of the girls at the pool — was asked to replace her. Ironically, the character Jennie was inspired by Chloë in the first place.
The original script had a part where Telly tells a story of Casper as a child walking in on his parents having an S&M lovemaking. Mistaking it for a real attack, Casper stabbed his father to death with a carving knife. A similar scene would later be included in Ken Park — though no S&M is involved.
Written-In Infirmity: Averted! Due to the Extremely Short Timespan, Justin Pierce's broken wrist (which happened during filming) couldn't be written in. You can, however, see him holding his broken wrist above his head during the night pool scene (to limit the pain).
Leo Fitzpatrick, who played Telly, got so much backlash from people who hated his character (as he put it, he "became the biggest fucking villain of the summer") that he first had to move to New Jersey and later England. It took him until he was in his twenties to feel comfortable acting again.
