Mia Farrow was pregnant during filming. Director Jack Clayton did a lot of close-up shots and put her in a lot of flowing costumes.
Many of the male extras in the party scenes were recruited from the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, because military officers had the clean-cut hairstyles worn by 1920s men.
Truman Capote was the original screenwriter. In his rejected draft, Nick Carraway was an overt homosexual and Jordan Baker a vindictive lesbian. When Capote was fired, Francis Ford Coppola was hired, and he wrote his draft in three weeks.
Robert Towne refused a chance to write the screenplay, despite a $175,000 salary, saying: "I didn't want to be the unknown Hollywood screenwriter who fucked up a literary classic." Instead, he wrote Chinatown (1974), which earned him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Mia Farrow blamed her lack of on-screen chemistry with Robert Redford on his absorption in the Watergate scandal that engulfed Washington, D.C. at the time. Farrow claimed Redford spent all of his free time locked in his trailer watching the political scandal unfold on television. Two years later, Redford played Watergate reporter Bob Woodward in All the President's Men (1976).