• The movie was entirely improvised.
  • Ray Romano filmed all of his scenes in two days.
  • Brett Ratner, the director of X–Men 3, and Avi Arad, the producer of
    X–Men 3, have featured cameos in the movie.
  • Richard Kind, Hank Azaria, Andrew Newman, Tom Hodges and David Pressman all play poker together.
  • David Schwimmer was originally scheduled to play Larry Schwartzman, but had to drop out to direct his debut feature.
  • Lainie Schwartzman is loosely based on Annie Duke, a professional poker player whose brother Howard Lederer is also a top ranked pro. The characters are in no other way similar to their real life counterparts.
  • Zak Penn’s first movie, also improvised from an outline, starred Werner Herzog as himself.

  • Two cast members from The Grand were concurrently shooting No Country For Old Men. Woody Harrelson and Barry Corbin were flown back and forth between the two sets.
  • Matt Bierman, co–writer and producer of The Grand, has played in a weekly poker game with Zak for ten years. The idea for the movie came out of one of those games.