After making this film, writer/director Robert Benton said that he regretted the emphasis placed by critics upon its being a Alfred Hitchcock imitation. Benton said that he had intended it to be more a modern equivalent of the 1940s wave of noir thrillers about psychoanalysis (a group of films of which Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) is the most famous example, but not the only one) and that the directors he was actively using as direct influences on him were Jacques Tourneur and Fritz Lang, with the script being heavily influenced by Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944). Benton summed up the situation saying, "This (genre) territory is so staked out by Hitchcock that there is nothing you can do that won't remind someone of him."
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.
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.
On Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen (2009), "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." Later however, Streep seemed to have a more sympathetic opinion, saying of the film experience, "I'm not ashamed of what we did, I just wish we'd all aimed higher. People who are smart can't just do something that they think will be popular just because it is selling now."
The script for this movie was written by Robert Benton with Meryl Streep specifically in mind for the central part of Brooke Reynolds.