The dance scene on the beach was saved for the very end of filming, so that the two young leads would be comfortable around each other, and was done on a closed set (just the two leads, co-writer and director Wes Anderson, and the cameraman).
In the film, Laura Bishop shouts at various family members through a bullhorn. The idea came from co-writer Roman Coppola's childhood, as his mother Eleanor Coppola used a bullhorn in a similar fashion.
According to Wes Anderson, Suzy's discovery of the "Coping with a Troubled Child" pamphlet was based on a similar experience from his own childhood: "It wasn't anything terrible. It's just something that at the time, when I found it, I was like, 'What is this?!' I immediately knew who that troubled child was, even though hypothetically, it could have been someone else."
After filming was completed, Kara Hayward got to keep the kitten owned in the film by her character Suzy, and Jared Gilman got to keep the backpack used by his character Sam.
Commenting on the film's connection to the first time he fell in love, Wes Anderson has said, "Well, what I wanted to do was re-create the feeling of that memory. The movie is kind of like a fantasy that I think I would have had at that age. When you're eleven or twelve years old, you can get so swept up in a book, that you start to believe that the fantasy is reality. I think when you have a giant crush when you're in fifth grade, it becomes your whole world. It's like being underwater, everything is different."
Wes Anderson: ["Peanuts"] The dog is named "Snoopy", and the story is set in the debut year of the groundbreaking cartoon A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965). Rushmore (1998) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) also contain numerous "Peanuts" and Charlie Brown references.
Wes Anderson: [strained marriage] The twice divorced Bill Murray plays a character that has marital issues in this movie. His character also has marital issues in several of his previous collaborations with Wes Anderson, including Rushmore (1998), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). His character in Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) is happily married, however.
Wes Anderson: [divorce] Suzy's parents are on the verge of divorce; the parents in The Darjeeling Limited (2007) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) are also divorced.
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