The movie is packed with characters based on real people and events from the life of Burroughs. Like Bill Lee, William S. Burroughs was an exterminator and drug addict, who accidentally shot his wife during a drunken game of "William Tell". Joan Lee is based on Joan Vollmer, Burroughs' deceased wife. Hank and Martin, Bill's fellow writers, are Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs moved to a section of Tangier, Morocco, known as the "International Zone", hence "Interzone". Tom Frost is based on Paul Bowles, and Kiki was the name of a young man Burroughs had a same-sex affair with in Tangier, while writing "Naked Lunch".
This was originally going to be the first David Cronenberg movie to be made outside of Toronto, until a panicked Ontario Film Board offered him unparalleled financial inducements and incentives. As it transpired, however, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait scuttled any plans to film in Tangier, Morocco, so the entire movie ended up being made in Toronto anyway.
The shooting of the author's wife is not a fictional incident. Source novelist William S. Burroughs did indeed accidentally shoot his wife Joan in the head in 1951 in Mexico in a "William Tell" stunt that went disastrously wrong. Mexican law at the time meant that Burroughs only served thirteen days in prison for killing his wife.
A desert was re-created on a Toronto soundstage by pouring seven hundred tons of sand onto the floor of a former munitions factory.
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