JA: The girl who plays Alice had a big crush on Ryan, so she was all a twitter about their rather lengthy kiss. I don't think she had ever kissed a boy for that long, and I tortured them. I actually had more film than I needed, and I just let them keep going.

Ryan is the only story that is miraculous because we needed a Jewish kid from New York. We were in New York with a very low budget and we were looking at Jewish and Italian kids, anybody that had an ethnic look. But we couldn't find a kid that could act or was funny. Ryan is from Oklahoma and is not a Jew. We got avideotape from him early in the process and we didn't even open it. But then we had five days left and we didn't have a Lenny. So almost at the choke we said open the tape from Oklahoma. We quickly flew him out. He was brilliant, but he wasn't the character. So we crossed our fingers and threw him in with a dialect coach and 24 hours later the coach called and said "he's got it." Ryan is an idiot-savant, except he's not an idiot. He just knows how to act.

THC: Marshall, where did the idea stem from?

Marshall Karp: Actually it was during the writer's strike of 1988, when we couldn't write for money. So I could write for love and passion. I hadn't really written a feature that I would show to anybody. I'd written a lot of television. The idea comes from character, and remembering what it was like to be that age and how different it is nowadays. I thought there might be something interesting in a kind of timeless story about a boy who is discovering his sexuality in a time when once you discover it, what are you gonna do with it?

THC: This movie deals with the sexual growth of these kids with a lot of innocence. They talk a lot about sex but, as you said, they never contemplate actually doing it. Do you think this accurately portrays the community depicted in the film? Is it something you think might be a problem for kids in relating to this movie now?