Davis had wanted to make an action film which focused on guns and was devoid of explosions. He conceived the film after seeing a scene from John Woo's critically acclaimed action film "Hard Boiled" (1992), in which star Chow Yun-fat rescues newborn babies from gangsters while engaged in a gunfight. Davis felt that the scene could be expanded into a feature-length film, a "gun-like" version of "Run Lola Run" (1998). By 2000, Davis had begun writing the screenplay; when the script was finished, however, studios refused to get it made after the Columbine High School massacre happened, causing him to shelve the project and return to making low-budget independent films.