Director Peter Greenaway has said of this film: "The 'painter film' is a small genre of its own: Michelangelo, Rembrandt himself (at least twice), Modigliani, Caravaggio, etc, and none more so than just lately. Picasso, Van Gogh (repeatedly), Bacon, Vermeer, and now Goya have received the treatment. I suppose our major aim in the film Nightwatching, apart from trying to match the Master's mastery of light, is to demonstrate Rembrandt as social moralist: it contains a murder mystery - the unraveling of which is the heart of the film. And also to regard Rembrandt as an inventor of cinema before the Lumière brothers...We tried to rise to the challenge in the film, remaking, with high definition digital tape, that upper right-hand corner space of Velázquez's Las Meninas - the area between the walls and ceiling has been described as the greatest bit of painting ever - a painting which is just and only and magnificently a painting of a block of darkly contrasting air. We, too, attempting a grand response Rembrandt image of light, tried to film a block of air that insubstantially floats, irrespective of walls and ceiling. Godard said that the cinema was the truth 24 frames a second. Can painting go better and say that paintings are the truth for all time? What's a second in cinema time if you can have an eternity in painting time? Cinema has come and gone in 112 years. What, then, is the age of painting?".
The film has an associated companion piece documentary called Rembrandt's J'Accuse...! (2008) which is also directed by Peter Greenaway and debuted about a year after this narrative film.
First film in director Peter Greenaway's "Dutch Masters" series.The second film is Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012). The third film will be about Hieronymus Bosch.
Co-producer Jean Labadie has described this film as being "a return to the Greenaway of I misteri del giardino di Compton House (1982)".
The film was selected to screen in competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2007.