The actual Dreamland cinema in Margate (which stood in for the Empire cinema in this film) was opened in 1923. It changed hands several times during its lifetime and finally closed for good in 2007. It still stands, although empty, because it is a listed building and so cannot be demolished without parliamentary approval. The block of flats where Steven lives with his mother is not an optical effect: it is really is that close to the building (with Margate railway station being just 100 yards up the road).
Although this is Sir Sam Mendes' ninth film as a director, "Empire of Light" marks the first time he directed from a screenplay he had written entirely himself. All of his other films, including a co-writing credit for the film 1917 (2019), were directed from scripts by other screenwriters.
The film makes reference to the terms 'rude boy' and '2 tone', terms from a period in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The terms refer to some young musicians (both black and white) who were born and raised in the UK and who started to adopt the dress sense and musical influence of ska-based Jamaican dance hall music but with a British spin on it. The movement is thought to have originated in the city of Coventry; its most famous proponents included bands like The Selecter, The Beat, The Specials and Bad Manners. The most internationally successful of these bands was 'Madness', whose earlier hits were considered to be heavily influenced by the 2 tone movement.
The film is bookended with poems. Near the start of the film. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is used, a poem which claims that spring proves that humans are profoundly dead. At the end of the film, a poem by Philip Larkin claims that May leaf growth shows the previous year's gross is dead but this year brings a fresh start.
In a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Sir Sam Mendes detailed his vision for the movie theater featured in the film: "It was based on a cinema I myself remember quite clearly, I went to many times, in Brighton, which has now been turned into a casino... I wanted to find a sort of properly real place, a working-class community as well as a middle-class community. I didn't want it to be quaint, I didn't want it to feel 'cute English' and lots of sort of wrought iron and post-colonial architecture. I wanted it to feel a little bleaker, a little bit more real, a little grander in scale. And Margate, which is actually on the north coast of Kent looking up towards the North Sea, is all of those things. And on top of that... is this extraordinary cinema, which is now fully abandoned but we brought back to life. The movie house itself is called Dreamland. In our movie, it's called the Empire."