Assistant director Nat G. Deverich was almost killed during the scene showing the destruction of a ship at sea, which was filmed off the coast of Monterey, CA, and was not--as was reported in the press at the time--a miniature shot in a tank at the studio.
Mary Pickford insisted that her best friend Frances Marion be not only the writer but also the director of this film. The Love Light (1921) marked the directorial debut of scenario writer Marion, who frequently collaborated with Pickford. Marion would amass more than 130 screen credits (including Camille (1915) and Camille (1936), Stella Dallas (1937), Dinner at Eight (1933)). At one time, she was the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood in a career that spanned from 1915 to 1940. Marion was also the first female writer to win an Oscar, for her influential prison drama The Big House (1930). Samuel Goldwyn called Marion his favorite screenwriter and she had close friendships with other powerful figures in Hollywood like Irving Thalberg. But Marion paid her greatest debt to the women like Pickford who helped her career along the way, saying "I owe my great success to women. Contrary to the assertion that women do all in their power to hinder one another's progress, I have found that it has always been one of my own sex who has given me a helping hand when I needed it."
The male lead in the film, Fred Thomson, was Frances Marion's husband. Thomson was an ordained minister turned actor whom she cast as Joseph in The Love Light (1921) -one of several villains he played in his wife's films. Thomson soon developed into an important Western star, in 1927, surpassing even Mary Pickford's husband Douglas Fairbanks in box office popularity. Thomson died very suddenly and tragically of tetanus in 1928 at the age of 38, leaving Marion to raise their two young sons on her own.
While on her European honeymoon, Mary Pickford also selected a cast of mostly unknown actors. All performers were required to speak Italian, which Pickford felt would "[add] to the expressiveness of the pantomime." Although the story is set in Italy, the European actors were brought over to Hollywood, CA, for filming.