California Doubling: More like Virginia Doubling - the House Chamber was shot in the chamber of the Virginia House of Delegates in Richmond. The theater which Tad Lincoln was watching his play in can be found in Fredericksburg.
Extremely Lengthy Creation: Spielberg researched for this film for 12 years, down to the correct wallpaper and books in the White House of 1865 and the right ticking noise for Lincoln's watch (Recorded from the actual one housed at the Kentucky Historical Society, which he carried on the day of his assassination!)
Life Imitates Art: This film led to Mississippi officially ratifying the 13th Amendment 150 years after it passed. To explain, after seeing the movie, Dr. Ranjan Batra, an academician at the University of Mississippi, and his colleague Ken Sullivan were interested in the history of the amendment and found to their surprise that Mississippi's vote was missing from the national record. Sure enough, it turned out their vote had never been sent to the US Federal Register, though the 13th had long become common law in the state. They wrote to their congressmen to correct this error, and on February 7th 2013, Mississippi officially ratified the 13th Amendment.
A rare director self-enforced case. Steven Spielberg eventually started addressing his principal actors by character name while on set, and even took to wearing a time-appropriate suit while filming so he didn't clash with the scene.
Daniel Day-Lewis accepted the role under the condition that he got a year to prepare.
Sally Field, who normally nowadays plays sweet, [grand-]motherly types, as controlling, bitter, mentally unstable Mary Todd Lincoln.
While he's certainly played heroic characters before, Daniel Day-Lewis' turn here is generally subtler than some of his more recent work as Large Ham villains in There Will Be Blood and Gangs of New York.
Daniel Day-Lewis and Sally Field had only met in passing prior to this film. Mary's and Lincoln's relationship is fraught, to say the least; however, over the course of filming the two actors quickly came to adore each other.
The great-grandfather of actor Michael Stanton Kennedy was a newspaperman from the town where his character, Hiram Price, lived. When filming the scene where the 13th Amendment passes, Kennedy started to cry and couldn't explain why until later, when he told Steven Spielberg "We're in this room recreating one of the most important moments in American history... and up there [in the balcony] with the press sat my great-grandfather."
Saved from Development Hell: The movie had been in various stages of production for over 10 years before finally coming to screen.
The film was initially conceived as a miniseries covering the entirety of Lincoln's presidency. Spielberg and Tony Kushner ultimately decided it would be easier to focus on the struggle over the 13th Amendment.
Liam Neeson was attached to play Lincoln through most of the film's development, and even read thirteen books about Lincoln, as well as copies of Lincoln's own personal documents, in preparation. However, he dropped out in January 2010, believing he had become too old to play the part. In a curious twist, Daniel Day-Lewis was cast as Fr. Ferreira in Martin Scorsese's Silence, the role that Neeson eventually took when that project got stalled.
Harrison Ford was at one time rumored to cameo as Andrew Johnson (who ultimately does not appear in the film.)
Creator Backlash: Despite the catalogue-spanning nature of their live shows and their tendency towards full-album sets, there are three songs that they have noticeably avoided playing in live shows. One is "The World's Address"; the other two are:
"You'll Miss Me." A song dating back to their earliest days, it had always gotten a good response in live shows, but it proved to be a struggle to translate the song's live energy to the studio recording. They later found, as they "got more focused on what [they] were good at... it sort of stopped fitting in with the rest of the show."
"I've Got a Match" hasn't been played live since 1989. According to John Flansburgh, they just got burned out on playing the song and aren't eager to revisit it. True to their word, while both of the above songs were played in one 2015 Lincoln set, this song was still skipped outright.
A more lighthearted example is that they're embarrassed that they made a point of finding an actual glockenspiel to play a single chiming note twice on "Shoehorn with Teeth" during the recording sessions, when they could easily have used a sample. The turned into a Running Gag in live shows where they made a huge deal about bringing a glockenspiel out on stage for the song, even performing a theme song for the glockenspiel.
