The movie went through pre-production in New Orleans. Just a few weeks before production was to begin, Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. With the location in ruins, the movie made the decision to find a new location to shoot. A few weeks after the decision, canceling the movie altogether was in talks. Finally, three months after the hurricane, the film returned to New Orleans, Louisiana and began pre-production once again.
Tony Scott, Denzel Washington, Val Kilmer, and Jim Caviezel held a news conference upon their arrival to New Orleans to announce their intention to employ the local New Orleans community and incorporate post-Katrina New Orleans into the film.
While working on the film, first assistant cameraman Michael S. Endler learned that his father, Gerald Endler, had died. As a tribute to Gerald, a former special effects technician who had actually worked with many of this film's effects crew decades earlier on other projects, Michael was allowed, on the day of shooting the ferry explosion, to place some of his ashes on a gasoline-filled water jug that would be blown up as part of the pyrotechnics of the sequence (which was referred to on call sheets as the "Stumpf Ferry Gerald Endler Memorial Pyro Blast").
Disaster relief teams, who helped through the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, were recruited to help make the film. The end credits pay tribute to their bravery.
Scriptwriters Terry Rossio and Bill Marsilii didn't feel Tony Scott captured what they wrote in the screenplay. They felt he was more interested in the action scenes than the intricacies of time travel. They felt they wrote a plot that was airtight, but in Scott's hands, the finished product is now filled with plot holes. Rossio was so disillusioned with the film that he's never seen it. Scott also admitted he did a mediocre job directing the film, but blamed that on the nineteen-week production schedule, which wasn't as long as he wanted.