To transform into Tina, Eva Melander gained weight and spent four hours in the makeup chair. She would invariably start her makeup process at 2 am every day.
While creating the film, Ali Abbasi was influenced by a lot of Latin American magical realism, including works by Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Roberto Bolaño.
Director Ali Abbasi holds an Iranian passport and, under 2018 US immigration laws, would not be allowed to enter the USA. However, he was granted an exemption to attend the Telluride Film Festival.
Aubrey Plaza, involved in no way with the film, was such a fan of it that the filmmakers offered to allow her to host a screening. She arranged this screening at a theater in Los Angeles and invited sixty people to attend. Ten minutes before it was to begin, she was informed that the film had not arrived in the theater. She went into the lobby to announce this, but mid-announcement was told the film had arrived. Everyone was seated and then forty minutes went by. She asked friends Fred Armisen and Nick Kroll, who were in the audience, to go on stage and entertain everyone. Armisen pretended to be the film's director while Kroll took questions from the audience. This lasted another twenty minutes. Ultimately the theater management said the film never arrived, but offered to show the crowd the film Suspiria (2018) instead. Then, an hour into showing Suspiria, they cut the film off abruptly and began to play Border, which had finally arrived. Plaza relayed this story on Conan (2010).
Official submission of Sweden for the 'Best Foreign Language Film' category of the 91st Academy Awards in 2019.