The picture was classified and rated with a restricted NC-17 rating in the USA due to its explicit sexual content. Distributor Fine Line Features decided not to appeal the decision in order to try and gain a lower classification rating to make the movie marketable and able for younger audiences to attend. The New York Times reported "Fine Line Features, the art-film division of New Line Cinema, has accepted the rating for 'Wide Sargasso Sea (1993)' which includes male frontal nudity".
Filming began in early July 1991 in Jamaica over six weeks during one of the hottest heat waves. Filming then moved to studios in New South Wales, Australia, following by two weeks of filming in October 1991 for the final scenes in northern England at the Graystoke Castle in Cumbria County.
Director John Duigan has said of this film during the 1990s in an interview with 'Signet': "It was probably the only really unsatisfying interaction that I've had with a production company and I found that I had major disagreements with them and with the producers. It was unfortunate. Jan Sharp, the producer of the film, had the tenacity to get the film made, but she and I had differences of opinion. She was very well informed on the book, and I'm sure her opinions were arguable, as I like to think mine were, but when you have a situation like that, I think the overall project can suffer. I think the film did suffer from that division. But curiously enough, it got quite wonderful reviews from most of the heavyweight American reviewers like the New York Times and the New Yorker. So there were some people who felt that it worked very well. I felt that it had some major flaws so I wasn't particularly happy with it".
According to study website Shmoop, "[Source novelist] Jean Rhys first read Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre in 1907, when she arrived in England as a teenager. As a native of the Caribbean herself, she was 'shocked' by Brontë's portrayal of Bertha Mason, Rochester's Creole wife who was locked up in the attic (Rhys 1999: 144). Nearly fifty years later, Rhys turned the story of Brontë's 'madwoman in the attic' into a full-length novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which pretty much established Rhys as one of the greatest novelists in the twentieth century . . . Wide Sargasso Sea also alters the historical setting of Jane Eyre by pushing the chronology up almost thirty years later in order to take advantage of another foundational moment in Jamaican history, the abolition of slavery in 1834. Setting the novel during this tumultuous period enables Rhys to situate the figure of the white Creole woman in the complex of shifting race relations under British colonial rule".
One of only two filmed adaptations for the cinema from a written work by Jean Rhys with the other, the first, being director James Ivory's Quartet (1981), made by Merchant Ivory Productions (MIP).