In an interview with 'Esquire' magazine, Woody Allen once said of the making of this movie: "When good weather was needed, it rained. When rain was needed, it was sunny. The cameraman was Belgian, his crew French. The underlings were Hungarian, the extras were Russian. I speak only English - and not really that well. Each shot was chaos. By the time my directions were translated, what should have been a battle scene ended up as a dance marathon. In scenes where Keaton and I were supposed to stroll as lovers, Budapest suffered its worst weather in twenty-five years".
The soundtrack was originally scored with the music of Igor Stravinsky, but Woody Allen thought it made the scenes "unfunny". He discovered Sergei Prokofiev's lighthearted music worked far better.
The wheat scene with towards the end of the film is a direct visual parody of Ingmar Bergman's classic Persona (1966). The juxtaposition of faces is an homage to Bergman's trademark shots.
Boris is in his cottage writing poetry. He reads, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas." He then promptly balls up the writing and throws it into the fire, calling it "too sentimental". The line is from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of 'J.Alfred Prufrock'".
Filmed mainly in Hungary, with some scenes done in Paris. It wouldn't be until 1996 and Everyone Says I Love You (1996) that Woody Allen would make another film outside of the New York area.
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