When Chow Yun-Fat turned down the role of To Minh, he recommended to producer Meng Xia a young actor, who had just worked with him on a TV series. Chow didn't know the actor by name. Leading man George Lam spoke of a young actor who played a small role in a movie starring Lam. The young actor made quite an impression and Lam thought the young man would fit in the role of To Minh. But he didn't know the actor by name. As the shooting began in Hainan Island and the role of To Minh was still undecided, the whole crew became anxious. Cinematographer David Chung suggested another young actor and Meng Xia went to meet with him. Xia finally cast the young actor as To Minh. The actor was Andy Lau, who happened to be the same unknown actor who Chow Yun-Fat and George Lam referred to.
The People's Republic of China, just ending a war with Vietnam, gave Hui permission to film on Hainan Island. Boat People was the first Hong Kong movie filmed in Communist China.
The film's English title is misleading: Boat People does not tell the story of boat people, it instead tells the plight of Vietnamese people under communist rule, the reason causing them to become boat people. The Chinese title, literally meaning "Run Towards the Angry Sea", more accurately describes the film's content.
Smuggled into the 1983 Cannes Film Festival and screened, but was dropped from the main competition after protests from leftist groups and at the request of the French government who was seeking better relations with communist Vietnam at the time.
In the late 1970s, a great number of Vietnamese refugees flooded Hong Kong. In 1979, Hui was making the documentary A Boy from Vietnam for the RTHK network. In the process of making the film, she collected many interviews conducted with Vietnamese refugees about life in Vietnam following the Fall of Saigon. From these interviews, she directed The Story of Woo Viet (1981) starring Chow Yun-Fat as Woo Viet, a Vietnamese boat person in Hong Kong, and Boat People.