Director Nicholas Meyer was reputedly so annoyed at the studio's interference with this film's East vs West plot that he recycled it on his next film, Star Trek VI : Terre inconnue (1991).
Writer-director Nicholas Meyer said of this film in his book The View From the Bridge: Memories of Star Trek and a Life in Hollywood, "The film, which came to be known as Company Business (1991), was a catastrophe, and it was no one's fault but mine. Going forward without a finished script was suicide. And while on paper, the troika of Hackman, Baryshnikov, and Meyer might have appeared promising, in reality we were all pulling in different directions, and my bouts with Hackman just about wrecked me. There were a couple of sequences in Company Business (1991) of which I was proud, notably the tense spy swap sequence in the Berlin subway - but isolated sequences do not a good film make. A great movie is great from start to finish. Company Business (1991), alas, did not come close."
During post-production, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
The film was originally intended as a vehicle for both Richard Dreyfuss and Elliott Gould, but both dropped out of the project before production began.