Trivia

Robert Pattinson already knew 13-month-old Scarlett Lindsey, who plays his baby daughter Willow: She is the daughter of his longtime friend, musician Sam Bradley, whom he knows since their school days together in London. Identical twin girls were initially cast, but as late as two days before filming was about to start, Pattinson couldn't bond with them, as they wouldn't stop crying as soon as he picked them up and got upset every time they were without their mother. He and Claire Denis felt not ready to shoot with them because the final film would have ended up entirely different. The night before filming began, Pattinson had the idea to ask his friend the last minute and so they flew in from London the next morning. She actually took her first steps ever infront of the camera while filming.

Claire Denis's first English language film after 13 feature films in French. She stated the reason she made it in English was that she simply couldn't imagine people speaking French in space, only either English or Russian.

The script, which Claire Denis wrote with her longtime collaborator, screenwriter Jean-Pol Fargeau, was first written in French. It was rumored English novelist Zadie Smith worked on the English draft, but Denis didn't see eye to eye with her and ultimately rejected it, stating that, "My producer introduced me to her. I thought it would be great to work with her, but we don't have the same philosophy of life. She disliked my casting for the lead and she wanted to change the story. So I asked her, 'Tell me the story you want.' It was so different, it was so unsexy for me. Nothing against her, but she wanted the people of the ship to - she wanted them to return to Earth. 'Going home,' she kept telling me. I said, 'What the fuck do you mean, going home? There is no one alive there!' She also wanted to retitle the film to 'A New Life'. I really tried, honestly tried. But sometimes people, they have different perceptions of the world. I've read her books - and I know why: We are on the same planet, but not living the same life, for sure. So there was not even a draft."

All passengers on the spaceship are wearing uniforms with the number 7 on it. According to Claire Denis, it implies that their spaceship is one in a series sent out to space, but each ship is used for different experimentation.

Claire Denis 's idea to create a baby in space came after she read about physicist Stephen Hawking, who raised this possibility for space exploration since the original humans would die on board before they reached the outer limits of the cosmos.