The film is dedicated to Oscar-winning production designer Paul Sylbert, a mentor of director Daniel Kremer. He died just weeks before Overwhelm the Sky went into production, in November 2016. Sylbert, who designed sets for A Face in the Crowd (1957), The Wrong Man (1956), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), and Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), among others, taught at Kremer's alma mater Temple University in Philadelphia towards the end of his life (Temple was also Sylbert's alma mater), and Kremer was his teaching assistant for many years.
Originally exhibited in "Roadshow style" with Overture, Intermission, and Entr'acte, a very ambitious move for a low-budget film. Kremer is quoted as saying in a Filmmaker Magazine interview, "When Overwhelm the Sky was turning out to be long, and when I knew more and more that it had to stay long, I figured you only live once. And consider that a marquee doesn't get more epic than 'Alexander Hero starring in Overwhelm the Sky.' The idea is to take people back to a time when the cinema was more of an event. I'm not talking about 'event picture' in the context of a 21st-century tentpole flick. I'm taking about something sacred, about the way people used to experience cinema in that earlier era. There was more wonder and more ceremony about it, and a kind of loud poetry. I made a vow that if I ever made a long movie, I'd find a way to do [a roadshow release]."
In many of Daniel Kremer's previous films, he made a voice cameo as a background radio personality named Dean Van Puddy. This character becomes flesh and blood in Overwhelm the Sky and is played by Kris Caltagirone. The name of the radio program in the film ("Fallen Territory") is sourced from a poem Kremer wrote as a teenager, called "Van Puddy in Fallen Territory".
Celebrated film scholar and veteran film critic Gerald Peary proved a key early advocate for the film, stating, "Overwhelm the Sky is Antonioni's Blowup filtered through early David Lynch with echoes of Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts. It's an enormously impressive and imaginative feature by Daniel Kremer, a natural and a skillful filmmaker, with extraordinary black-and-white cinematography by Aaron Hollander and a brilliantly expressionist neo-Bernard Herrmann score by Costas Dafnis."