In poor health during most of the filming, Richard Burton had great difficulty remembering his lines and sometimes had to film a scene dozens of times before he could get it right. The scene in O'Brien's apartment where he is talking to Winston about Goldstein's book took a record of forty-one takes for Burton to say his speech without fumbling his lines.
Many of the scenes were shot on the days noted in Winston Smith's diary. The scene where Smith enters his apartment and writes in his diary, dating the entry April 4, 1984, was filmed on April 4, 1984.
This was Richard Burton's final movie before his death on August 5, 1984, at the age of fifty-eight.
Director Michael Radford and cinematographer Roger Deakins originally wanted to shoot this movie in black and white, but the financial backers of the production, Virgin Films, opposed this idea. Instead, Deakins used a film processing technique called bleach bypass to create the distinctive washed-out look of the movie's color visuals. This movie is a rare example of the technique being done on every release print, rather than the inter-negative or inter-positive; as the silver is retained in the print, and the lab is unable to reclaim the silver, so the cost is higher, but the retained silver gives a depth to the projected image. The 2003 DVD release (the only release to restore Dominic Muldowney's full musical score) was mastered from the original negatives (not a release print), and thus inadvertently restored the movie's original color saturation.
The movie was filmed during April, May, and June 1984. The closing credits declare that "This film was photographed in and around London during the period April-June 1984, the exact time and setting imagined by the author (George Orwell)."