According to an interview he gave to the New York Times in 2010, Wes Bentley appeared in this movie during the middle of decade-long, extremely serious addiction to cocaine and heroin. He said in that interview that he only accepted any movie roles during that time so that he would have money to buy enough drugs.
During two Q&A sessions at the Vancouver International Film Festival (2007), director Allan Moyle stated that he intended to use completely different and better known songs for several of the sequences on the film. Because of how expensive the rights of those songs were, he decided to use local Ontario bands to supply the needed music for the scenes.
The character of Omar was originally written to be a Cockney Gangster named "Nigel", but when the Director, Writer, and Producer saw Raoul Bhaneja's audition, the role was re-written to fit his hilarious (and oddly hard-to-place) fake accent. Thus, Omar was born.