The very first scene writer Emerald Fennell thought of was a female character lying on a bed while someone takes her pants down, as she is drunkenly asking "What are you doing?", then asking the same question in a completely sober manner. She wrote the rest of the film based on this idea, and the full scene did end up in the finished film.
The title is likely a reference to Brock Turner, a Stanford University student who was convicted of sexual assault in 2016. The judge sentenced him to only six months in prison on the basis that he was a "promising young man."
The words "rape" and "sexual assault" are not spoken in the film.
Emerald Fennell said that one advantage to filming in L.A. was that production was able to entice a lot of her first choice actors to sign on for the smaller roles in the film, since it involved little to no travel and a much shorter time commitment on their part. She referred to the cast as a whole as "an embarrassment of riches."
A few months before the film debuted at Sundance, writer/director Emerald Fennell and her producers set up a test screening to gauge the reactions of a wide audience. During one of the scenes, a fight started between two audience members. One person was very angry about the scene, and the other person was telling them to leave if they didn't like it. She told IndieWire about the incident: "It was quite visceral and that was quite shocking because obviously I wanted to make a film that was thought-provoking that people talk about, but I wasn't expecting that."