mother died, which Hynes saw as "a huge amount of loss". After deciding that "I have to do less," he took a road trip, spending much of his time writing as he traveled. He wrote "really different things", some of which were pieced together and led to his script for The Go-Getter, which he wrote in 2004. Within six months of the script's completion, producer Lucy Barzun Donnelly had raised the entire budget of the film without any actors attached at the time. Barzun Donnelly recommended to Hynes that he consider Lou Taylor Pucci for the lead role of Mercer, believing that he was "perfect". Hynes watched Pucci's 2005 film Thumbsucker and thought that "We'd be so lucky to have him." He contacted Pucci about the role but was leaving for Norway in less than a week to attend a friend's wedding and wanted to meet with him before leaving. Pucci was in San Francisco on a press tour and Hynes flew from Los Angeles to have lunch with him. Hynes said of the meeting, "I think we really [got] each other," and Pucci accepted the role a week later. Jena Malone signed on to portray Joely because she "loved the script" and was keen to play "a woman on the cusp of learning to toy with her [...] sexual manipulation"; she only later learned that Hynes had written the role with her in mind, having previously worked with her on the short film Al as in Al. Hynes said that Zooey Deschanel, Maura Tierney, and Bill Duke each joined the cast because they "read [the script] and really liked it". He made a deliberate attempt to cast Deschanel and Malone against their previous types. He described Deschanel as a "glamour girl" and Malone as a sexually mature woman. Filming Four months before filming began, Hynes asked Barzun Donnelly to set US$20,000–25,000 aside from the film's budget so that he could perform a test shoot. Hynes, cinematographer Byron Shah, a camera assistant, and a stand-in for Mercer—as Pucci had not yet been cast—traveled to every location in the film except for Mexico. Over , they shot of film, testing different filters, lenses, film stocks, and shooting styles. Hynes wrote an 85-page shot list, "scop[ing] out" the entire film. He called the test shoot an "incredible boon" and remarked that "Not one frame of it ended up on the movie, but