Denis Leary has said that he, Danny Glover, and Ray Liotta only did the picture because they each wanted to buy property. Filming took so long, and got so bad, they all started carrying around pictures of the property and looking at them to get them through the shooting.
According to Rick Lazzarini, the elephant replicas looked so realistic, they fooled the real elephant when it saw them on the shooting location.
It took three months to build all eight elephants. Two were animatronic, and made life-like movements operated from a control system, while the other six are static, and were made out of fiberglass.
At the end of the movie, an abridged version of the song "When I See an Elephant Fly" from Dumbo (1941) can be heard.
The character shop constructed a total of eight life-size elephants to resemble the real one in the movie.