The "eggplant subplot" was originally not written in the screenplay at all. Rather, it was worked into the film while actually shooting. Director Daniel Kremer remembered someone saying "What do you feed your eggplant?" in a dream he had from which he had awakened laughing. In directing the opening scene, director Daniel Kremer told actor William Cully Allen to, somehow and in some way, work the absurdist line into the dialogue and to see where it took him in the scene. Allen's delivery of the line allowed a facet of his character (his fixation with eggplants) to be played out and explored in the movie as a comical quirk of the character.
Daniel Kremer considers this film a companion piece to his film A Trip to Swadades (2008) insofar as they are both about the theme of return and both depict a strange familial relationship.
Originally, there was a completely different ending shot. A new ending was written and filmed much later (in late autumn, which substituted for the Fourth of July) which proved more satisfactory and more in the spirit of the film's tone.
The car sequence was mostly improvised by the actors, even though the scene was written a certain way in the screenplay.
The shot towards the beginning of the film, in which Si looks at himself in the dresser mirror of his darkened bedroom, is a play on the passage from 1 Corinthians 13:12, "For now we see through a glass, darkly" which Ingmar Bergman used for the title of his film Through a Glass Darkly (1961).