Pamela Anderson's agent turned down the script without showing it to her. Anderson's son Brandon Thomas Lee came across the script by chance and got it to his mother. She read the script quickly and said she wanted to do the film. Soon after, Anderson fired her agent.
The film was shot in 18 days.
In a 2025 interview with Dave Bautista for Interview Magazine, Gia Coppola talked about the process of getting Pamela Anderson on board. "With Pamela, no one really could come to mind for her character. I had seen a picture of her on Instagram because she was promoting her documentary, and I had thought, 'She would be intriguing,' but I really knew nothing of her as an actress. But after watching her documentary, you see she's so full of art and creativity. She's so knowledgeable about arthouse cinema and poetry. She's a beautiful writer and a person that had a lot of vulnerability and similarities to Shelly. She was itching to express herself in a different way that would make it exciting to work with her. I didn't know her at all, so I went to her agent at the time but got turned down within an hour. A record time of rejection. But I couldn't take no for an answer. I saw that her son was an executive producer on the documentary. I asked anyone if they knew Brandon Thomas Lee and I finally found someone. We went to dinner and I talked to him about the project. Then he was like, 'Good news. She read the script, she loves it, she'd love to talk to you.' When we talked, she was selling herself to me and I was like, 'No, no. I want you to do this project. I'm trying to sell myself to you.' It cut all the fat and we were able to execute straight into the project."
The film marks Pamela Anderson's first starring role in nearly a decade, after Luke Gilford's short film Connected (2015). Before that, her last starring role was in Pamela Anderson in: Stacked (2005).