This is the sixth film in Spike Lee's series "Brooklyn Chronicles."
Isaiah Whitlock Jr.'s third time portraying Detective/Agent Amos Flood in a Spike Lee Film. The first and second times were in La 25ª ora (2002) and Lei mi odia (2004), respectively.
This is the first time Spike Lee directs himself since Summer of Sam (1999).
Nate Parker and Colman Domingo also starred together in Birth of a Nation (2016).
In a 2012 interview with John Turturro for WNYC, Spike Lee detailed the origins of the film: "One early Saturday morning I called my man James McBride, said 'We gotta have breakfast'. We met at the Viand Coffee Shop, corner of 61st and Madison, diagonally across from Barney's. Best coffee shop in New York City. And we were just talking about what we felt where cinema is today, Hollywood, black cinema. I just bought a new Sony F3 camera, digital camera. And I said, 'Look, I got this camera, I got some money, let's write something'. And we both have teenage children and we both talked about how when was the last time we saw a black teenager film that wasn't a gang-banger, and then it just evolved from that. James grew up in Red Hook... He grew up in the church, the church you see in the film, his parents founded that church. It's the New Brown Memorial Church. And then when Carmelo Anthony got traded to the Knicks, I did a thing on him, a short thing for internet, for Boost Mobile. And we started at the Garden, we drove to the Red Hook projects, we went to the building where... he grew up, 79 Lorraine St Apt 1C, so all these things just started to form."