The film is dedicated to Billie Neal, with whom Director Kasi Lemmons worked on Eve's Bayou (1997) and Gridlock'd (1997).
Choreographer Otis Sallid originally tried professional dancers to play the moth-seraphs, but decided to switch to athletes instead, saying they had "the bodies, the mentality, and the strength".
Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant supposedly resides at the top of the Chrysler Building.
Throughout the film, Romulus raves at, and about, a fictional man named Stuyvesant. In Samuel L. Jackson's earlier film One Eight Seven (1997), his character works at a school in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.