Trivia

All the actors underwent hypnosis as part of their preparation for the film. James McAvoy claimed that his hypnotism session was successful and left him unable to move his hand during the duration of the session.

In the room of lost/ stolen paintings there are three of the thirteen taken in 18 March 1990 burglary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts: 'The Concert' by Vermeer, 'Chez Tortoni' by Manet and 'Storm on the Sea Of Galilee' by Rembrandt. The other paintings in the room are: 'Woman with Fan' by Modigliani (one of a haul of five taken from MOMA, Paris, May 19 2010); 'The Chorus' by Degas (taken from the Musee Cantini, Marseilles, France, December 2009); 'The Nativity with Saint Francis and St Lawrence' by Caravaggio (taken in a suspected Mafia theft from the Church of San Lorenzo, Palermo, Sicily, October 18 1969); 'View of Auvers' by Cezanne, (although the version shown is not that taken from the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK during a fireworks display December 31 1999),

Rosario Dawson joked on the Tonight Show when the film was released that the hardest thing about doing the total nude scene was having to have all her pubic hair waxed off. Otherwise, she said she knew about the nude scene when she signed on and had no problem taking all her clothes off when the time came since she felt it made sense for the character at that point in the movie. It wasn't gratuitous or sexual.

Filmed during a break in Danny Boyle's two-year preparation schedule for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. The film was edited after the Olympics wrapped.

During an interview, Rosario Dawson was asked what she thought about being totally nude in the film and why that scene was so important. She explained: "How I feel about nudity is we're all naked under our clothes. I'm imagining you all naked right now. (laughs) I thought it was really interesting. I haven't done a lot of nudity in films, but this was reminiscent to Alexander.... It's really about someone who against all odds is trying to make something happen. She is trying to make him retrieve this memory. It's the most intimate thing that she has done to take him to the most personal, deep space in his memories.... You don't really know what's happening in all of this, but it is a trigger. It is a piece of a puzzle, and it made a lot of sense to me. I thought it was dangerous and risky for her. It felt less so for me. It felt a lot more like it was a huge part of her and where she was going to be revealed, too, and to the story. It felt very clever which was in keeping with everything else that she had done. If it had felt like some other kind of move where it was a sexy kind of thing that she was trying, I think it would have been terrible. But it wasn't that. It was very smart and calculated."