Trivia

Tomas Alfredson has said that production was too rushed. He came on board late, and reckons that up to 15% of the screenplay was never filmed. Location filming in Norway was shortened so production could move to London, which compromised the story. He was also not given enough budget to shoot certain scenes in the script. As a result, several subplots in the film are unfinished and never resolved, characters come and go without explanation and even straight up disappear from the film (most notable being J.K. Simmons' character), and several continuity errors and plot holes are present in the story.

All of Val Kilmer's lines are dubbed throughout the film. According to a Reddit AMA in May 2017, Kilmer disclosed that he had "a healing of cancer," and his tongue "was still swollen although healing all the time."

One big challenge when assembling the film according to the editors was to use whatever footage was shot to try and stitch together a barely coherent story, given that 15% of the script was never filmed. This especially proved to be difficult when trying to edit a comprehensible ending as the editors were running out of usable footage.

Tomas Alfredson spoke out against the film and disowned it merely a week before its premiere, stating that it "didn't work" as a film.

Martin Scorsese was originally attached to direct this film. He remained on board as executive producer.

Jo Nesbø: who is author of the source novel.