The movie's screenplay almost never made it to Pierce Brosnan. Richard Shepard said: "I wrote it to make it on digital video for two hundred fifty grand. I wrote the most outrageous character I could (in Julian Noble), because I figured it would never get made in Hollywood."
Although Julian travels to Vienna, Las Vegas, Moscow, Sydney, Budapest, Tucson and Manila, the film was shot in just 40 days in and around only Mexico City, Mexico.
When Pierce Brosnan, Richard Shepard, and Catherine Marie Thomas (Cat), all met to discuss the look of Brosnan's hitman Julian Noble, all agreed the character would depart completely from Brosnan's James Bond persona, and his Thomas Crown character, in The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). Thomas said: "I looked at a lot of old pictures of Pierce, stuff from the eighties, where he actually did have a mustache, and there was just something so different about it. It fit this man who was past his prime, holding onto something he doesn't have anymore. Maybe, a little sleazy." Shepard said: "From the beginning, I wanted Pierce to have a mustache and a crew cut, and in Cat's first meeting with me, she said, 'I think he should have a mustache' and I jumped, 'you're hired.' The best part was when we had a rehearsal in Los Angeles two weeks before shooting, and I had not seen Pierce in months, and he shows up with a crew cut and mustache. If you could have seen my smile that day, 'cause I knew he was totally going to go for it.'"
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