Stanley Kubrick raved about this film in an interview with Vicente Molina Foix, which was conducted during the production of The Shining (1980), and named it his favorite film of 1978.
The film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, who deemed it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" in 2019.
This film began as a thirty-minute short funded by the American Film Institute for $10,000. Footage from the short became the first seven minutes of the completed feature. Director Claudia Weill decided she wanted to expand the story into a full-length movie and received funding through the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council for the Arts to the tune of $80,000. When that money ran out, the production stalled until private investors could be found. This caused the production to stretch out over two and a half years. Actual filming took six to seven weeks.
Susan's camera is a Mamiya/Sekor TL/DTL series.