Director Emin Alper loves long dinner scenes, which feature in almost all his movies, as these scenes are ideal to surface simmering tensions. The movie's garden dinner sequence was rehearsed many times, where he let the actors improvise to some degree, and added a few he liked to the script. When it came time to shoot it, the scene was almost ready, but it still took four nights of filming, and the biggest challenge was to keep everyone on top of their game throughout the long shooting hours.
Director Emin Alper wanted to follow a lonely idealist fighting the corrupted elite of a city. He was inspired by the recent political happenings in his home country of Türkiye. The city where it happens, Yaniklar, is entirely made up, but it's a real microcosm of modern day Türkiye, the same way the town in the play "An Enemy of the People" is to Norway. This 19th century play, by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, is a great inspiration to Alper.
The film was shot in the city of Kayseri, in central Türkiye, at the foot of Mount Erciyes.
Rough cut of Burning Days is 2h 35m long.
The first name of the film was Balkaya.