Killing Zoe - Production

Production

Killing Zoe was director Roger Avary's feature directorial debut. Producer Lawrence Bender had scouted a bank location in Los Angeles as a possible filming location for Reservoir Dogs. Knowing he could attain the location for very little, and being a savvy producer, Bender telephoned all the screenwriters he knew and asked if they had any screenplays that took place in a bank. Avary told him he had one, even though he didn't, and proceeded to write one in a reported week and a half. The film was, however, not shot in the bank Lawrence Bender originally scouted. Avary stated he wanted to make "an art-house film for both the coffeehouse crowd and the exploitation crowd."

Despite being set in Paris, the film was shot almost entirely in Los Angeles, California. Only the opening and end credit roll and some small car driving clips were filmed in France.

In an interview included on the DVD, Avary explains how he wanted to make a movie about how nihilistic he felt his generation was, and said that watching Stoltz in the film was like seeing his evil twin come into creation. He wrote the script specifically for Stoltz. Both he and Stoltz admitted they had a fantasy to rob a bank (though Stoltz qualified this with ‘and not go to jail’!) and making this movie was as close as they would get.

Avary stated that, as a first time director, it was a dream to work with actors as talented as Jean-Hugues Anglade, Eric Stoltz and Julie Delpy.

Killing Zoe is notable as the first feature film to use the newly invented Otto Nemitz Swing & Tilt lenses, which were used during the heroin sequences for perspective distortion instead of their original purpose of perspective correction.