In one scene, John LeTour (Willem Dafoe) is shown sitting on his bed watching old photographs and listening to some CDs. One of the CDs is the soundtrack from Walter Hill's Streets of Fire (1984), which was Dafoe's first starring role.
Writer-director Paul Schrader experienced a unique problem while filming was underway in New York City. The film is set during a sanitation worker strike which called for large amounts of uncollected trash to be prominently featured in exterior scenes. But since the real New York City sanitation department was very much on the job they would inadvertently collect trash that was meant to be a part of the film's production design.