After Pedro Almodóvar sent the script to Tilda Swinton, he enquired who ought to play Ingrid; both of them pictured Julianne Moore in the role.
Pedro Almodóvar's first full-length English-language feature.
It was shot in New York and at Echo Lake Park in New Jersey; however, most of the principal photography took place at Casa Szoke in Spain. The house was chosen because its surroundings resembled the woodland around Woodstock, New York. The location is about an hour’s drive from Madrid.
Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton share the birth year 1960; Swinton was born on 5 November, while Moore's birthday falls on 3 December.
The film's cast includes two Academy Award recipients: Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.
The sequence in which Michelle wanders through Martha's house is evocative of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. At times, elements of Alberto Iglesias's superb score call to mind the harmonies of Bernard Herrmann's. Despite their very different registers, both films probe the fear of death.
The short story 'The Dead', from James Joyce's Dubliners, is explicitly referenced on three separate occasions throughout the film. One of those references appears in the closing images of the eponymous film directed by John Huston in 1987.
Julianne Moore and John Turturro have previously appeared together in The Big Lebowski (1998) and Gloria Bell (2018).
This marks Pedro Almodóvar's first feature to be rated PG-13.
Tilda Swinton took on both parts of a mother and her daughter in the film The Eternal Daughter.
Ingrid and Martha's lodgings are in the Szoke House, which is situated on the southern slopes of Monte Abantos in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, close to Madrid.
In the flashback in which Fred's wife collapses to the ground in front of the burning house, the scene is staged to resemble Andrew Wyeth's 1948 painting, "Christina's World."
