Marks the first joint venture of real-life spouses James McAvoy and Anne-Marie Duff on a feature film. While still married they would appear together in several episodes of Shameless (2004) and after divorcing they would both have their voices in the animated series Unten am Fluss (2018) and appear in His Dark Materials (2019).
In reality, Countess Sofya bore Leo thirteen children and copied out six drafts of his novel "War and Peace" - by hand.
There still is a real Tolstoy family, who live in Yasnaya Polyana, Russia. This movie was made with their support and they like it, although they were surprised that one could laugh about Lev. (If you look closely, you can catch Anastasia Tolstoy, an Oxford graduate, in a short scene at the end of the movie.)
Christopher Plummer was eighty during filming, just two years younger than Leo Tolstoy was in the period depicted in this movie. Writer and Director Michael Hoffman really liked the fact that Plummer could play his own age.
One of Writer and Director Michael Hoffman's biggest challenges was to turn clean and orderly Germany into messy and chaotic Russia.