Bill Murray is listed in the Very Special Thanks section of the credits. In the commentary, Aubrey Plaza says that while she and Murray were filming Dans la tête de Charles Swan III (2012), he gave her his dark blue sweater when she became ill. She wears it in the bank scene and the tropical restaurant scene.
The production was delayed by some setbacks when director Matt Spicer accidentally walked through a sliding glass door after yelling "cut" and gaffers had to remove fragments of glass from his arm with duct tape. At one point the production had to evacuate their location due to the raging Santa Clarita brush fires in L.A. county.
Taylor posts about reading Joan Didion's book "The White Album," a collection of essays. The first line of the titular essay is "We tell ourselves stories in order to live," and deals with the writer's struggles with mental illness, and her perception of Hollywood and Los Angeles in the 1960s as a place filled with paranoia and detachment, reflecting Ingrid's story and the themes of the film.
The song that Ingrid and Taylor listen to in Dan's truck was originally going to be "Kiss from a Rose" by Seal. This would have tied into Dan's Batman obsession, as it's from the Batman Forever (1995) soundtrack. When the filmmakers were unable to afford the rights to the song, "All My Life" by K-Ci and Jojo was used instead.
Taylor references the Normal Mailer book "The Deer Park" as one of her favorites, although it is eventually revealed that she has never actually read it. The book is about a fictionalized version of Palm Springs (known in the book as Desert D'Or), filled with Hollywood phonies, thieves, and misanthropes, who are as sympathetic as they are repellent, reflecting the lives of the film's striving young LA would-be Instagram stars.