Production notes

Filming took place in Mineola Middle School and Mineola High School on Long Island, New York. In the same month, director Tony Kaye said in an interview. "My agent sent me this fantastic piece of writing by a guy called Carl Lund. A writer. One of the things that I felt was how real it was. And writing is really about research and speech and I thought this guy’s really done his homework. In fact it turned out that he had been a teacher. So then it all became very clear. And then when it really began, if you like, really really began was when Adrien Brody sort of popped up and said I'll do this. A couple of weeks before we were supposed to start to shoot. And then I decided myself at that point I'm gonna hang the whole thing on you [Brody]. And try to build out your character of Henry much more and make it all everything about you. Just you." The interviewer then asks Kaye if he rebuilt the script at that point. Kaye responds, "Well I reinterpreted it, yeah. When Carl first wrote it, I believe it was a very vignette ensemble thing." ”Carl's script was very impressionistic, and [a] part of what I do, sometimes, [is] very impressionistic storytelling. I used that to its full, here, to try and make sense of it all.... There's more [footage] of Marcia Gay Harden and Bryan Cranston [which] I've got in the hard drives, and I'm hoping to [get] it out, in maybe a longer cut."

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 57% based on 72 reviews, with an average rating of 5.8/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Detachment's heart is in the right place, but overall it doesn't offer any solutions to its passionate ranting." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 52 based on reviews from 20 critics. Peter Travers from Rolling Stone awarded the film three out of four stars, praising the performances of Adrien Brody, Marcia Gay Harden and Lucy Liu. "Detachment gets to you. It hits hard", he wrote. A reviewer for Student Handouts, which reviews books and films for those working in education, said: "It easily makes Dangerous Minds look like a pandering Lifetime made-for-TV movie."