Film historian Adriano Apra included this film as one of the top ten films of the 21st century (to 2016).
Director Paolo Benvenuti said Lucia Poli didn't want play in this movie at first. "But at a certain point, because she was playing the bourgeois woman, I said: 'I'll teach you a lesson'. We shot the first scene in a cell. It is the famous scene of the dialogue inside the cell. That cell is located under the old praetorian palace, which has now been turned into a hotel; the hotel's toilet pipes passed through there and one pipe was broken. There was a stench of shit which was a terrible thing. I want to shoot there and I want to see what it does. Lucia Poli shows up all made up and when I see her in makeup, I say: 'What is this stuff? Go on, go wash your face. I want you, your real face, I don't want make-up, so take off your theatre make-up, because this is not theatre, this is cinema'. She says: "But not even a little powder?". I add: "No, at the most, the soap, the yellow one for the clothes, that's all you have to wear". Not only that; I put a wig of old woman's Grey hair on her head. She leaned heavily on her blond curls. Off she went: I put on her old woman's hair, removed her make-up and she finally collapsed. If you look closely at the first scene she is very tense, totally contracted, but she was so frightened by the experience that she completely gave in to what I was saying. She did everything like an automaton and there I finally got control of the situation," Benvenuti recalls.
Director Paolo Benvenuti revealed that In the scene where Gostanza is hung by the rope, Lucia Poli has been replaced by a foam mannequin containing a skeleton and moved by a device.