Ken Adam based his designs for Wallenberg's house on his memories of his parents' home in Berlin before the war.
Director Tinto Brass claimed that the actresses who play the prostitutes in Kitty's brothel were all very enthusiastic about their characters. He has said that they told him that liked being able to explore that side of their own personalities.
The dinner-jacketed client throwing the penile-shaped darts at the girl in the brothel is an uncredited Aldo Valletti, who is best remembered for his role as the debauched President in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò ou les 120 Journées de Sodome (1975).
Ken Adam began work on this film immediately after production wrapped on Barry Lyndon (1975). He had found working with the previous film's director, Stanley Kubrick, suffocating due to Kubrick's obsessive attention to period accuracy and tendencies to micromanage. Adam was, by contrast, very happy to create the sometimes quite stylized sets seen in this film.
In the English-language version of the director's cut, the restored footage (with the prison cells, the sex circus beforehand, and a few other graphic sexual scenes) is in Italian. This is because these scenes were not included in the original, censored English version and only the Italian soundtrack exists.