"Crime + Punishment in Suburbia" is inspired by Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment", but aimed at a teenage audience who probably won't be familiar with it.

This movie was originally titled "Crime and Punishment in High School" but three weeks before we started production, the Columbine massacres took place and the studio made us change the title. We wanted to make a high-school movie that was about murder and God and redemption. There are a number of loose adaptations of "Crime and Punishment" that have been made... Robert Bresson's "Pickpocket", two films by Paul Schrader - "American Gigolo" and "Light Sleeper" - that all have elements of the novel in them. In this case those ideas are described through a girl in high school, and I think that's very appropriate.

Many of the characters in the film are - or become - loners. Is this something you identify with?

One of the reasons that I badly wanted to make this movie was that when I was sixteen or seventeen, there were less than ten movies that meant a lot to me: The James Dean movie "Rebel Without a Cause" and two Francis Ford Coppola movies - "Rumblefish" and "The Outsiders" - among others. I felt separate from the world I lived in and having those pieces of culture made me feel there was a world outside that I might be a part of. I wanted to make this film so that kids like me would have that opportunity now.

It's quite a dark film for teenagers.

I hope it will be marketed at teens here. In the States, it had an R rating, so it couldn't be marketed to its audience. But this is a moral film that people who commit murder suffer because of it and they're punished. Kids aren't afraid of dark subject matter. It's more adults who are afraid of those.

Rob Schmidt talks about his earliest and latest films.