In a 2022 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Paul Schrader spoke about how the style of the film serves to create an atmosphere of unease and unfamiliarity: "Well, there is a coldness; there's a withheld-ness - in the performance, in the production design. There's not much furniture around, and what's with those jellyfish on the wallpaper? So there's a kind of distance, which is intentional. And that little room he lives in, which makes no sense. So, yes, you're using those stylistic elements to make the viewer feel that there is a gap between what you want to feel and what you do feel. And that's a calculated gap that you create stylistically - sometimes by use of the camera, more often by not using the camera, by not giving certain things. It creates a sense of unease, that makes you feel, 'this could be a story I know very well, but somehow I'm looking at it and I don't think I know it very well at all.'
Zendaya was Paul Schrader's first choice to play Maya, but they couldn't come to an agreement on what fee she would be paid.
The title has a double meaning. "Master Gardener" designates a certification program, generally under the auspices of universities in the United States and Canada, providing intensive horticultural training to individuals who then go on to use that knowledge of plants in professional or volunteer contexts. But "master" is also used here in the context of "master race," the false, pseudo-scientific Nazi worldview that held that so-called "Aryans" (the Nazis' historical label for blonde, blue-eyed people of German, non-Jewish lineage) were superior to any other groups, especially to Jewish people.