Made on a minimal budget (four-and-a-half million dollars.) in 1996, The Wachowski Brothers wrote and directed the neo-noir heist film as a fairly quick way to make a hundred million dollar movie "The Matrix". The film's origins could be traced back to the 80s show "Cagney & Lacey" which was about two female detectives cooperating with each other; the film even references the show. Critics also saw influences from how The Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, and Alfred Hitchcock makes their movies. As Richard Schickel points out the "comically excessive, in-your-face violence; intricately coincidental but not entirely unpersuasive plotting; black humor; and, at the center of the story, a large sum of funny money and, more important, a sweetly loyal, ultimately all-conquering romance" can be traced to themes found in other films of the 90s. Another film combining female couples and crime was 1991's "Thelma and Louise". The main story of the film of stealing money from the mob and framing someone else for it is as old as the stories in the Bible (Esau and Jacob).
The movie sells itself on the violence and lesbian sex. While the sex only dominates the early part of the film, the violence lasts all the way through. Starting with a man being tortured and de-fingered in a bathroom and culminating in the fatal shooting of another. In the end, the women escape providing the audience with the message that crime pays.
The film nearly fell through, but the attachment of the two stars (Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon) helped keep the project afloat. However, Tilly had originally wanted the other role, but settled for her final role based on how much she had in common with her. It was Gershon who brought the film's antagonist an actor, Joe Pantoliano. Bill Pope, the director of photography, was hired because the previous DP said the film couldn't be shot as intended with its low budget, but Pope said "I know a bunch of cheap guys".
The Wachowski Brothers have a few things to say about their intentions making the film, "We're of the opinion that film is still first and foremost a graphic medium and should be about images more than it should be about talking heads. Talking heads are nice and all, don't get me wrong, but novels do talking heads a lot better than movies do. And I think that movies should take advantage of the fact that they are about images and pictures. I don't think people take advantage of that enough. It always disturbs us when people criticize Bound for being too stylized. Nobody ever criticizes movies for being totally boring-looking like an ABC after-school" and that "We think that not only gay people or queer people live in closets. Everybody does. We all tend to put ourselves into these boxes, these traps. And so what we tried to do is we tried to define as many of the characters through the sort of trap that they were making out of their lives. Getting out of the closet was meant to take on a bigger meaning than just the typical gay meaning".
