Trivia / Manderlay

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: It may seem Lars von Trier was not interested in telling the stories about racism and enslaved people's plight, but rather to tell an allegorical story that deconstructs White Man's Burden by setting in a hypothetical 20th-century Southern plantation. However, his 20th-century plantation scenario actually occurred in real world - even well into the 1960s, thirty years after the setting of this movie.
• Box Office Bomb: The film brought in only $675,000 against a $14 million budget, far lower than even the $16 million box office of Dogville.
• Fake American: British actors were cast as nine out of the twelve slaves portrayed in the film, because American actors steered away from the film due to its content.
• The Other Darrin: Both characters from Dogville are played by different actors. Bryce Dallas Howard replaces Nicole Kidman as Grace, and Willem Dafoe replaced James Caan as her father.
• The Other Marty: John C. Reilly was originally signed to play Dr. Hector, but was replaced by Željko Ivanek during production. A donkey was put to death while filming, and it was reported in Entertainment Weekly that this was what prompted Reilly to walk off the set, though he has never commented publicly on the incident or his exact reasons for leaving the film. Executive producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen told Swedish media that "people should not be upset - instead they should think about the situation of the Third World". Since the movie was filmed in Sweden, they followed Swedish law, which says that animals can be put to death in movie productions, if a veterinarian is the one carrying out the killing. Lars von Trier later cut the scene from the film, which was attributed to protests from animal rights groups. Von Trier said that he didn't want to draw attention away from the content of the film.