Roberts discovers that the photo of the convenience store was paid for with Sophie's credit card. The film presents two more different versions of these events, and Sophie must figure out which is real before she loses grip on her sanity, and her life. The second version suggests that Sophie was present at the shootings and was only spared because the shooter ran out of bullets, and the third suggests both Sophie and Hugh were killed. In the words of Cox, her character "goes through three phases. First there's denial. Then she feels guilty and sad about the situation. Then she has to learn to accept it." According to Greg Harrison, the events in the film were Sophie's memories as she and Hugh lay dying on the floor of the convenience store: "Each movement of this memory was her process of coming to terms with the terrible trauma, which was that she was killed for absolutely no reason, and it was some random act of violence she couldn’t confront". He added he felt November was "open-ended" enough that he hoped viewers would "come up with the most beautiful stories themselves that are very different from how I saw it." Development The film's original script was written by Benjamin Brand, who had written and sold several unproduced screenplays to studios. Brand had served as an assistant to producer Danielle Renfrew on the film Groove (2000), which Greg Harrison had directed. Brand, Renfrew and Harrison were friends, and were living in their hometown of San Francisco developing separate projects at "mini-major" studios which, according to Renfrew, were "wallowing in development hell". Brand then read a newspaper story about a shooting during the robbery of a store, in which the robber had hidden the body of the proprietor behind the counter and then taken the proprietor's place at the counter as customers came in. Inspired by the story and its setting, as well as experiences in his own life (he had once been a teacher of photography at the Academy of the Arts), Brand wrote a screenplay and presented it to Renfrew and Harrison. They were both impressed; Harrison said it was "fascinating ... kind of an abstract exercise in narrative, which I thought was exciting and bold". Brand and Harrison worked through several drafts of the script over the following six months. Harrison, who cited the "terrible, terrible" experience of coping with