In a 2023 interview with Fangoria, Brandon Cronenberg spoke about how a real-life vacation experience inspired the film: "The film started as a short story just about the first execution, and as I was expanding it into a feature, I kept going back to a vacation I went on about 20 years ago to an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic. It was surreal, because they would bus you in in the middle of the night, so you couldn't see any of the country. They would just drop you in this resort compound, which was in fact surrounded by a razor-wire fence. You couldn't leave, much like in the film, and there was a kind of fake town where you could go shopping. The Chinese restaurant and the horrible discotheque in the movie are both based on that actual resort; the scene with the man on the ATV on the beach being chased by guards actually happened. And then, at the end of the week, they bused you back during the day, and you could see the actual immediate surrounding country, which was very poverty-stricken. There were people living in shacks. That contrast was obviously horrible, but also surreal, because you realized you had never actually entered the country; you were just dropped into this strange pocket of a sort of alternate dimension that had just grown up to become this tacky Disneyland mirror image of reality."

In the last bus scene, James' hands are clearly in view and uninjured when the right one should be cut, bruised, or at least bandaged.

There were two, slightly different versions released, an R-rated cut for the U.S. market, and an Unrated (previously, NC-17) one for the rest of the world and the home video market on Blu-Ray. Time differences are negligible; the differences are, as usual in cases such as these, that the Unrated cut contains slightly more violence and nudity. A detailed breakdown of the differences can be found at movie-censorship.com

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