An exhausted Meryl Streep balked when Director Curtis Hanson asked her to shoot one more scene before filming finished for the end of the day. However, she decided to attempt it. Swept off the raft, she was in real danger of drowning, before she was rescued. Returning upriver, she told a pale and shaking Hanson that "in the future, when I say I can't do something, I think we should believe me." Hanson hastily agreed.
Twenty five years after the release of this movie, Meryl Streep's daughter Grace Gummer marries David Strathairn's son Tay Strathairn.
Kevin Bacon claimed that it was by necessity that the cast did most of their own stunts, since shots with stunt doubles were always obvious.