Kathryn Stockett's book, on which this film is based, was rejected 60 times before it was eventually published.
The movie never reveals how Eugenia got the nickname "Skeeter." In the book, she says that when she was born, she was thin and leggy, and her older brother remarked that she looked like a "skeeter" (mosquito).
The film takes place in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963. This is when and where civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated. Real-life national news headlines of the assassination are used in the film at about an hour and twenty minutes into the film.
On her official Facebook page, Bryce Dallas Howard (Hilly Holbrook) said that she hung a photo of Hilly above her own toilet, "where she belongs."
Director Tate Taylor and Kathryn Stockett, the author of the book, were childhood friends in Jackson, Mississippi.