All of the wide shots of the actors on the ledge were real. Restraining cables were either hidden from camera view or edited out in post-production.
Sam Worthington helped kick start Man on a Ledge into production when he expressed early interest in the script. Worthington partially admits to being intrigued by the role because of his fear of heights, and the majority of the scenes on the ledge were set to be shot on the real ledge of the Roosevelt Hotel, over 200 feet above 45th Street in midtown Manhattan.
At around the 80 minute mark, one of the bystanders among the crowd starts chanting "Attica, Attica!", echoing the character "Sonny" played by Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Attica references a prison revolt that ended tragically, where law enforcement was blamed for excessive force and the death of both prisoners and prison guards alike.
The title of this film suggests a familiarity with Joel Sayre's famous "New Yorker" article of many decades earlier, "The Man On The Ledge", describing a famous suicide case of 1938; this article was the basis of the 1951 film "Fourteen Hours". Howard Hawks had been approached to direct that film, but had said he would only be interested in making this film if he could subvert the premise of the story, so that "the man on the ledge" is not actually wanting to jump, but pretending to in order to distract attention from something quite different. Hawks's idea, which he disclosed in several interviews in later years, was to make a comedy where the man was trying to escape a jealous husband who has returned home unexpectedly. This film uses a similar notion, but as a suspense thriller instead, with the attention paid to the apparently suicidal man meant to distract the police from a major crime occurring nearby.