Norton Baskin, portrayed in the movie by Peter Coyote and the real life second husband of the source novelist and film subject Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, has a small role in the movie as the man in a rocking chair giving directions to Marjorie to the hotel. Baskin also acted as a consultant to the picture.
The fiddle tunes Rip Torn's character plays, and the style in which they are played, are authentic to the region and era. They are based closely on recordings of Cush Holston, an old time fiddler who was from rural north Florida and recorded at an advanced age at a folk festival in 1960. The tune Torn sings is Holston's "Coon Dog," and the instrumental he plays before this is also from Holston, "Have a Good Time Tonight." The actual playing for the film was done by a Florida old time musician who had studied and researched the music of Holston.
The picture was filmed on some of the same locations in Florida, USA as the earlier famous Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings filmed adaptation El despertar (1946). These included both Hawthorne and Silver springs in that American southern state.
At the time the film was made and released, lead actress Mary Steenburgen was married to actor Malcolm McDowell, who appears in the film as Max Perkins. The pair had met during the production of Escape al futuro (1979) during the late 1970s and had got hitched on 29th September 1980 (and later were divorced on 1st October 1990).