Thomas Schmieder almost fell off a factory roof, while shooting a scene at sunset, because he stumbled over a lightning rod at the edge of the roof. The shot wasn't used in the finished film.
Franz Mozer and Erik Wiesbaum began production without having a finished screenplay in 2007. What they had in mind was a short film containing spies, flutes and abandoned places, like old factories that you could find a lot in and around the city of Chemnitz that time.
While shooting a scene on one of the rooftops of the Diamant bicycle factory, the film crew witnessed two young men breaking into one of the other buildings of the factory. Franz Mozer and Erik Wiesbaum, accompanied by the property manager, caught the young housebreakers after a short moment of hide and seek. When they tried to escape through one of the basement windows, Franz Mozer received them outside with his photo camera and the words "Bitte lächeln!" (german for "please smile!")
The name of the protagonist Will Roczinski, portrayed by Hendrik Reichardt, is a reference to the main character in Rainer Erler's Sci-Fi movie "Die Delegation" from 1970, in which Walter Kohut plays the TV reporter Will Roczinsky. In one of the scenes in Roczinski's apartment, he looks at three framed photographs, placed on a cabinet. One of them shows Walter Kohut in his role as Will Roczinsky.
The movie was shot as an on-off-project over three years.