One of the most magical and iconic moments in the book involves the three main characters driving through a tunnel in a pickup truck while blasting music as Sam stands up in the back of the truck. Chbosky described this scene as one of his favorite moments of the film. Through the shooting of the scene he watched from a monitor on the side of the set and said as he saw “Emma enter the tunnel as Emma Watson and through the course of that take…she left the tunnel and became Sam, forever, never looking back. She was amazing. In that moment, I knew the movie was going to be everything I could have ever hoped it to be.”
Music plays a prominent role in both the movie and book, connecting the two. Chbosky worked with music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas (The Twilight Saga, Gossip Girl) to create a fantastic soundtrack full of “early nineties-late eighties” music. They tried to use as much music from the book as possible, most notably the song “Asleep” by British indie-rock band The Smiths, which Chbosky dubbed “one of the greatest songs ever recorded.” One difficulty Chbosky encountered while working on the film was the fact that the story is extremely personal to him. He needed to have enough distance from the story to be able to film a true adaptation. Chbosky grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, just like the characters in the book and film. He described making the film as emotional because some images from the story have been in his head for twenty to thirty years. He explained that after going through the process of filming and editing every scene the images are no longer inside him. He describes making this film as his “great letting go.” To him, it was a reaffirmation of what this story means to him and how much he has been liberated by telling it and how much he wishes that other people will feel the same. Chbosky hopes high school-aged kids will see this film and love it because it celebrates what they are currently going through in their lives. He hopes their parents will see it and feel nostalgic, remembering what high school was like for them. He wanted the movie to target a broader audience so that it could be a connection between kids and their parents and ideally open up communication between them about the difficulties that high school brings. “I can tell you this,” Chbosky said, “The bad thing is not the issues the movie deals with, that’s not what hurts people. The thing that hurts people is the silence about it.”