AnnaSophia Robb and Dennis Hopper in Sleepwalking Courtesy of Overture Films

Have you thought about what happens to the characters after the credits roll?
When you're exposing an audience to a family that's deeply wounded and dealing with stuff that's not going to be fixed overnight, you can't then give them an end in the third act that ties everything up with a little bow. We never wanted Joleen to all of a sudden be a great mother, well-dressed and not loud, embarrassing and obnoxious. [Her relationship with Tara] was definitely going to have to evolve. And it's the same with James: I didn't necessarily want to see him go to jail, even though he commits a crime. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to go; he did something illegal. But there was a feeling at the end of this movie: life is hard but you do have choices, free will. It doesn't mean that once you make that choice, everything is going to work out great. When James is driving down that road at the end, visually says that anything can happen. The road, symbolically, was him making a choice. And after watching the movie, I really just wanted to wish him good luck.

Dennis Hopper and Nick Stahl

The relationships in this movie are so complex, especially the father-son relationship. The killing scene is very much defined by the shot of Frank standing over his kneeling son.
Stahl: Telling him not to get up, with his eyes on the ground. You actually came up with that on your own, didn't you? The shovel and all that?

Hopper: Right. Actually killing [my character] with the shovel.

Stahl: Took it to another scary place. That was scary, too.

Hopper: Actually first we shot the death scene inside the house. And we went back and did a re-shoot. And we decided to do it in the barn, with a shovel. We all came up with various ideas and we put it together and it worked. The concern of the scene was that we protect AnnaSophia, who's 12 years old. She's a wonderful actress and was gung ho about it — we were probably overprotective. We blocked it out really well and tried to make our dramatic moments, and Nick and AnnaSophia were both really professional and really wonderful moment-to-moment actors.

Did you talk about back story any? Because there's not a lot of that about their relationship in the movie. You just see the repercussions.
Stahl: We didn't really talk too much about it.

Hopper: No, because it was written well — we knew our characters.

Stahl: You got a sense of their history. His abuse towards Tara was probably the exact same as it was towards Joleen. And the moment of him with his head bowed, looking at the ground, that encapsulates our relationship, encapsulates me being completely submissive to him. I've had the life sucked out of me a little bit. I think that was pretty understood in the writing. We didn't even go into details of my character's childhood.