The film was playing in Berlin's largest movie theaters when the Berlin Wall fell. A lot of East Germans crossing over to West Berlin went to see it, expecting Western-style porn.
In order to achieve the film's lurking feel, Steven Soderbergh played with camera techniques. "I used the tracking shots because I knew that I had a very talky film and I didn't want it to be visually static," he told the Chicago Tribune. "Without detracting from the performances, I wanted to keep things moving. I also wanted a very predatory feel, the idea of encircling a character and getting closer. It seemed to fit a sort of languid quality that I wanted to have and that Baton Rouge-my hometown and the location of the movie-seems to have."
The film was written by Steven Soderbergh in eight days on a yellow legal pad during a cross country trip (although, as Soderbergh points out in his DVD commentary track, he had been thinking about the film for a year).
Steven Soderbergh deliberately chose video as a metaphor for distance. "Video is a way of distancing ourselves from people and events," Soderbergh explained to Film Comment. "We tend to think that we can experience things because we watched them on tape. For Graham, this was an aspect of myself taken to an extreme measure. He needs the distance to feel free to react without anybody watching, which, I guess, is the definition of voyeurism, even though I think voyeurism has mostly negative connotations."
The film was inspired by Steven Soderbergh's own failed relationship. "I drove the most important woman in my life to leave because I didn't want to be in the relationship but couldn't just say, 'I don't want to be in this,'" Soderbergh told Film Comment. "So I was very deceptive about how I got out of it. And then once I was out of it, I couldn't even allow it the dignity to die properly. I kept stringing it out and not letting it go and then I got involved with some other people." After, Soderbergh was able to reconnect with that person; "We were able to be friends," he noted.