from the TRL world premiere, Oct. 26th, 2002:

Justin: You know, it's funny. A lot of people have asked me if the video is about her. It's not about her. It's about me. and all in all when I wrote the song and people started hearing the song, then speculating what it was about, I just figured hey, you know, if you guys wanna speculate what the song is about, I may as well give you something else to talk about. So.
Carson: Yeah, you know how everybody's talking about this video, even here at MTV. The buzz that surrounds it. I mean, you made a really good-looking video.
J: Thanks man, I appreciate it. It's kinda like a mini-movie.
C: Yeah, it has sort of an American Psycho feel to it, your character in the movie.
J: Yeah.
C: But the girl really does look, uh, identical to Britney, and then there's little nuances throughout the video like the angel you use as a doorstop, and there's a sort of symbolism that runs throughout.
J: Hey man, I'm crazy.
C: You are. You a crazy psycho. But that's cool. I think it's a good looking video, and we're just gonna let people watch, we're gonna world premiere it and they're gonna make up their own minds about it.

Lise: First, the lyrics in the title - that rewrite was all Rae's. She sang it once and I cracked up - because it really does scan better than the line that's already there.

Second: I think - either both of us or just me, I really wanted the 'real' evidence - the photo from the Celebrity tour, this little interview - I wanted them later on in the story, rather than present everything chronologically - which would have put this very close to the beginning. Because the more and more you learn, the more frightening reality becomes. and then you get to this point, and you see that it's much less made up than it originally seems. the story actually gets more plausible, rather than less.

lise: So, but yes. This was something I insisted we add. Because once the CMAR video premiered we couldn't not have it. But honestly, well and truly - this was more than half written by the time we knew for sure Justin was a stalker. (This, for anyone who missed the TRL premiere of Cry Me A River, is not at all made up.)

kel: I don't know if we've mentioned this once or six thousand times -- we'd already started writing the story when the video for CMAR premiered.

lise: We were writing it before Justified came out.

kel: We were writing it before Carson compared Justin to American Psycho.

lise: And then all these things happened, in sequence, and we couldn't not include Carson calling Justin a psycho on national television, or Justin filming his own stalker tendencies, or all of that. So it had to go in, because as shocked as we were about it happening, it happened.

kel: We bought into the Cult of Timberlake when it was still underground.