According to a 2012 article in "The New Yorker" by John Colapinto, director George Roy Hill handpicked Walker from hundreds of actresses who auditioned for the role of "Val". The filmmakers were so impressed with her performance that they reshaped the film during editing to focus more on her character, and shot the scene of her walking through a snowy Central Park months after production had wrapped. According to Colapinto, in the 2000s Walker revealed through a series of posts on IMDb that she and Hill fell in love during the filming, and that the relationship lasted throughout most of Walker's senior year in high school, despite the fact that Hill was married with children and, at age 44, was nearly 30 years older than Walker. Walker claimed that the resulting Hollywood gossip made others reluctant to cast her and contributed to her decision to stop acting in the early 1970s.