The title of the original script was 'The Skin Interpreter'. Writer-director Daniel Kremer disliked it and changed the title to A Trip to Swadades when he encountered the Portuguese word "saudades" in reading Jorge Luis Borges. The word "saudades" (meaning "intense longing and nostalgia for a thing of the past"), coincidentally, is production designer Paul Sylbert's favorite word. Sylbert is fluent in the Portuguese language.
During the rehearsal period, the director gave all the actors individualized CD music mixes that pertained to their respective characters. Their instructions were to pick one song from the mix and to work with it in the performance. Actor Bob Swenson, who portrayed Schweitzer, selected the song "My Sister and I" performed by Tommy Dorsey and His Orchestra. Swenson claims that that song was much of the foundation for his performance in the film.
The film was shot by uniformly and deliberately underexposing the film stock. In the processing, the super-16mm black-and-white negative was "pushed" (a process which compensates for lack of proper exposure), thus heightening the grain. In addition to this, the blacks, whites and grays in the image appear precisely and properly distinguished from each other. This accounts for the unique visual quality and peculiar texture of the film. The contrast was also especially boosted for the film's rural exteriors, which were shot in West Grove, Pennsylvania, about three hours from the city of Philadelphia, where the majority of the film was shot. Some of the "home movie sequences" shot especially for the film were "pulled," which compensates for overexposure, to give it an opposing quality to the rest of the film, which is all "pushed" material.
Daniel Kremer told actor Stephen Hatzai to base his performance of Claude Schoonover on the mannerisms of Sterling Hayden.
The part where the character Schweitzer mistakes his old friend Schoonover for someone who was "eaten by a shark in Frisco" is a reference to Richard Fariña's Beat Generation novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. In the novel, the main character Gnossos observes an old friend walk up to him after not seeing him for a long time, saying "I thought you were eaten by a shark in San Francisco or somethin'." Similar to the film, the character in the novel is returning to his old stomping grounds, much like the Schweitzer character does in the film. The novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me is one of the director's favorite novels.
Daniel Kremer: [Movie within the movie] An old movie playing on a television screen during a scene. In this film, it is Meet John Doe (1940) playing on the television during the opening convenience store scene.