Atom Egoyan embarked on a series of workshops and interviews with university students to better understand their attitudes towards communicating with each other via the internet and texting.
Atom Egoyan first read a news article about a Jordanian man who sent his pregnant Irish girlfriend on an El Al flight with a bomb in her luggage, without her knowledge, in 1986. He encountered the story again in 2006 which made him decide that there was ripe material here for a film about the extremism of terrorism and parental legacies.
The character of Tom was originally written as being older. Scott Speedman had read the script in Los Angeles and insisted on meeting with Atom Egoyan. When the director met Speedman, he immediately revised his preconceptions about Tom's age and made him younger.
One of Atom Egoyan's intentions with the film was to explore absences in the human condition, in this case largely from the viewpoint of Simon who has grown up without his natural parents.
Although the digital intermediate process had become an industry standard when this film was shot, Atom Egoyan wanted it to be color timed in the traditional photochemical way, as all his previous films had been. However, two reels ended up having to be timed digitally, due to dirt on the negative that had been introduced in the negative cutting stage.