Drawing from this story as well as from experiences in his own life (he had previously taught photography at the Academy of Art), Brand wrote a screenplay and presented it to Renfrew and Harrison.

Harrison, who cited the death of a close friend as one of his personal inspirations for the film, focused on inserting more emotional elements into the script; in his words they were "trying to express the subjective experience of trauma".

Renfrew consciously chose to avoid taking the project to major Hollywood studios such as 20th Century Fox or Warner Bros. and instead opted for "smaller companies who were interested in doing something off of center".

Greg Harrison's debut film Groove had impressed executives at the company, and John Sloss of Cinetic Media said, "November is exactly the kind of sharp and invigorating material that has made InDigEnt what it is".

While the Garry Trudeau project was intended as a comedy, Harrison said he felt Cox was "very capable of drama and was very willing and wanted to transcend her comedic persona".

[5] When the Trudeau project did not enter production, Harrison offered Cox the lead role for November without an audition: "Courteney's biggest challenge is redefining herself ...

The filmmakers were forced to shoot in Los Angeles, but Renfrew later expressed no regret in their decision: "We wanted the story to take place in an anonymous urban area.

For the opening robbery scenes (which recur throughout the film), Schreiber purchased two Panasonic AG-DVX100 cameras with white balance and color temperature controls.

She used them with lighting gels and sodium street lamps that surrounded the real-life convenience store where the crew was shooting to make the image appear green.

A similar process was used in the second movement of the narrative, which was bathed in orange to represent Sophie's despair, while white expressed "acceptance" in the film's third and final act.

To help achieve a blue colour cast for the first phase of the film ("denial"), Schreiber surrounded the shooting locations with machines that pumped smoke across the set.

Cinematographer and Sundance Film Festival judge Frederick Elmes commented of Schreiber's work, "She lit it and used colors in a way that the camera responded.

[5] November was shot in fifteen days on a budget of $150,000, and post-production costs were the same – a typical production model for films produced by InDiGent.

[8] Once shooting had wrapped, Harrison entered the editing room and constructed the film over the course of eighteen weeks, occasionally consulting colleagues such as Sarah Flack (editor of The Limey and Lost In Translation).

[11] Producers were reluctant to sell the picture to a distributor quickly, and gossip blogger Roger Friedman of Fox News commented that they "may have overplayed their hand in juggling offers".

[15] Audience response at its screening at the festival was generally positive, but critic Brandon Judell dismissed the film as "highly irritating and nonsensical,"[16] while Joanne Bealy said it was "a Mulholland Drive / David Lynch copycat ... even at 88 minutes, it was too long for me.

[1] It was originally slated to enter wide release in late summer,[21] but Sony Pictures Classics chose to expand the film into no more than 27 theaters (in its sixth week).

"[23] F. X. Feeney of the LA Weekly wrote, "it never becomes a mystery, like, say, Mulholland Drive, or even The Sixth Sense (despite the gimmicky magnitude of its final reveal)".

Club wrote, "with each successive trip back to the scene, things only become murkier and less compelling, lost in pretentious symbolism and obvious visual signposts".

"[27] Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert, who drew comparisons between the film's narrative and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of dying model, argued "answers would be beside the point.

[29] Marc Mohan of The Oregonian dismissed the film as "a post-Memento, mess-with-your-head thriller that thinks it's much cleverer than it is", but commented that Courteney Cox "doesn't embarrass herself" in her role,[30] while The Hollywood Reporter felt that she was "as convincing as she could possibly be.

[24] Others such as Walter Addiego of the San Francisco Chronicle believed the film was a conscious decision on Cox's part to "establish movie credibility after the megasuccess of Friends".

Tobias said the film "makes the most of its visual limitations",[26] and Marc Savlov of the Austin Chronicle commented that it was "soaked to its noirish core in some fine cinematography.