Stewart Copeland, drummer for rock band "The Police", composed the soundtrack for this movie. For inspiration, he immersed himself in Eastern European Gypsy and folk music.
Writer and director Paul Feig chose to give the character David the gift of quickly assimilating and communicating in new languages in order to avoid subtitling. He believed subtitling the many languages in this movie would have distanced the viewers from the story.
"Young David" was played by Clem Tibber, the real-life younger brother of Ben Tibber, who played David through the rest of this movie.
Although Hristo Shopov is fluent in English, most of his dialogue was dubbed by another actor (against the wishes of writer and director Paul Feig) due to the studio's concern about his accent.
Paul Feig revealed in 2020 that the movie bombed because, upon being told what it was about, no one wanted to see it, and one theater actually paid attendees $5 a person to see the film, adding that this audience loved the film.