In the film, Erik goes to the Berlin International Film Festival and wins a Teddy Award. According to the director, the Berlin scene was shot in New York. Keep the Lights On then won the same award in real life.
In a 2012 interview with Slant Magazine, Ira Sachs detailed the difficulties of getting the film made independently and what he learned from the process: "...I sent the script to an agent that I've worked with many times in Hollywood, and usually he comes back with a long list of actors I should consider, and the response I got when I sent him Keep the Lights On was, 'No one in our agency will be available for this film.' It was a quick assessment that something about the film was going to be uncomfortable for American production, and I would have to make it differently. The positive side was that I wasn't going to enter into this very extensive, cast-oriented development process that I had been in before and that can sometimes take years off your life. It's understandable, but drains a certain kind of energy out of a work-and isn't as independent as I decided I needed and wanted to be with Keep the Lights On. Basically I accessed the various communities for support to make the film, and I got that from hundreds of people, from getting free locations, to beautiful clothes and cheap Kodak film stock. Cameras were given to us. I learned a lot while making the film Last Address (2010), which is a film about a group of artists living in New York in the '70s and '80s who died of AIDS. Art-making was less capitalistic (during those times), and it was most community based. People didn't make things because they weren't allowed to, but chose to do so. There was kind of a punk aesthetic that I tried in my own bourgeois way to utilize in the making of this film. I picked a date. I said I'll finish the script in January (of 2011), and said I was going to make the film in the middle of July. I gave myself a limited leash. What ended up happening is I did raise a considerable amount of money to make the film, but I kind of put the fire under my a** in a way that made it possible. It was much more painful putting myself out in the world to get the economic support that I needed than it was releasing the private material of the story. I already processed that and felt comfortable with it."