Tracy's apartment was not a set. In order to get the desired view though the windows, it was specially constructed at the top of the famed Clocktower Building in New York. Cimino says in the commentary track how proud he is to be the first (and likely only) director to get that view of the New York skyline. "I can't stand going to a place and shooting it the way everyone's shot it before. People go to Paris, there's always the Eiffel Tower. They come to New York and it's The Plaza Hotel and Central Park. So I wanted a view of the city which would be unique and memorable."
Michael Cimino was officially allowed final cut of the film, but was forced to make one change to the ending. "The only change they asked me to make, which to this day I still find inexplicable because I think it sums up the movie, was to the very last line. At the end of the movie, there's another fight that breaks out on Mott Street, during a funeral parade. Mickey is in the middle of the mêlée, Tracy runs in and picks him up off the ground, they both look like survivors of a war. The camera closes in. If you look closely, you can see that they're not saying the line that you're hearing. The last line of the movie was, Stanley looks at her and says, 'Well, I guess if you fight a war long enough, you end up marrying the enemy.' Oliver Stone himself is married to a Vietnamese girl right now. I'm sure you'll see American's with Iraqi women at some point. For reasons that I can't understand, that line was not acceptable, so I took a line from some other place in the movie and I slipped it in and it doesn't make any sense at all. But that line, that sums up the whole movie."
When it was released, most American critics gave the picture a negative review. Cimino notes in his commentary track, "Interestingly enough, one of the few positive reviews we got was from someone who generally hates all my work, Sheila Benson. Because she's married to a Chinese man. And she wrote a very interesting reaction to this, because she was stunned at seeing things that she knew were real. See the one thing Sheila Benson got was the exploitation of Asians, by Asians. Of Chinese by Chinese, and that, she said, was the first time she had seen something like this."
According to Mickey Rourke, the part of Stanley White was written for Clint Eastwood or Paul Newman who both turned the role down.
The role of Tracy was almost given to Joan Chen. "She would have been amazing, too. In a different way," Cimino says. "But Ariane just had something more American about her. And that's what I wanted. She had to be equally Chinese and American, whereas Joan was clearly Chinese-born. But we could have made it work if we had to."