sentences:  At the time that he first read the novel, he was accumulating the finances for another film, but abandoned the project and decided instead to write a screenplay based on Nelson's story.His first draft of the script was written in two days, and the final draft was just 33 pages long.Similar to his 2003 film "Elephant", Van Sant sought non-professional young actors to play the main roles, and so created a page for the film on social networking site MySpace.