James Franco auditioned to play Young Toulon, Greg Sestero's role. He and Sestero have since collaborated on The Disaster Artist (2017), a film adaptation of Sestero's book "The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room (2003), the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made".
Greg Sestero was originally asked to audition for Toulon with a British accent, which he couldn't do well. Sestero, after discovering that Toulon was a French character, asked the directors if he could do his audition with a French accent. Sestero himself is of French descent via his mother, and speaks fluent French. Sestero attributes this to his getting the role.
At the time Greg Sestero was cast, he and Tommy Wiseau were both struggling actors trying to break into Hollywood. Although Wiseau was initially supportive, Sestero's long period away filming on location caused him to become jealous and sink into a deep depression. He ultimately broke himself out of it by beginning to work on a creative project, which evolved into the script for The Room (2003).
The effects team on the movie were told that the mummies were cut from the movie, but were re-added at the last minute so they had to go shopping in Bucharest fast and buy rolls of gauze bandages and then get back to the studio and prepare the mummies in just 3 hours.
Originally supposed to take place just after Puppet Master III - Die Rache des André Toulon (1991), with Toulon and his "friends" on a train bound for someplace other than Germany and encountering a variety of Nazis and demonic foes. This script, by Matthew Jason Walsh, was thrown out by Kushner-Locke because it "would offend the German audience".