Joshua Oppenheimer described the film as an exploration of whether we as human beings can come to a place where our guilt is too much to recover from our pasts.
The painting "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" by John Singer Sargent is featured as one of the masterpieces on the walls. Sargent painted a full portrait of Tilda Swinton's great-grandmother, Mrs. George Swinton (Elizabeth Ebsworth) in 1897. Swinton's family estate features Sargent sketches.
Oppenheimer initially wanted to film a documentary on an oil baron who's building a post-apocalypse shelter from an ex Soviet bunker in Czechia. After visiting the bunker, though, he decided he wanted to film what life in such a place would have been after an actual apocalypse, and turned the documentary into a fiction film.