On Watch What Happens Live. Andy Cohen: "Meryl Streep, name one bad film that you have made." Meryl Streep: "Eh, Still of the Night." Andy Cohen: "What was that about?" Meryl Streep: "Never mind."
While Brooke Reynolds (played by Meryl Streep) discusses her girlhood, Streep performs the monologue about the bell tower in an uninterrupted take of three minutes.
After making this film, director-writer Robert Benton said that he regretted the emphasis placed by critics upon its being a Hitchcock imitation. He said that he had intended it to be more a modern equivalent of the 1940s wave of thrillers about psychoanalysis (a group of films of which Hitchcock's "Spellbound" is the most famous example, but not the only one) and that the director he was thinking of as a more direct influence on him was Jacques Tourneur.
Writer-Director Robert Benton once described this movie as "What happens to a man when he finds himself falling in love with a woman he fears." This question, the premise of the movie, resulted from Benton's own personal experiences.
The script for this movie was written by Robert Benton with Meryl Streep specifically in mind for the central part of Brooke Reynolds.