Zendaya was Paul Schrader's first choice to play Maya, but they couldn't come to an agreement on what fee she would be paid.
In a 2022 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Paul Schrader spoke about how the style of the film serves to create an atmosphere of unease and unfamiliarity: "Well, there is a coldness; there's a withheld-ness - in the performance, in the production design. There's not much furniture around, and what's with those jellyfish on the wallpaper? So there's a kind of distance, which is intentional. And that little room he lives in, which makes no sense. So, yes, you're using those stylistic elements to make the viewer feel that there is a gap between what you want to feel and what you do feel. And that's a calculated gap that you create stylistically - sometimes by use of the camera, more often by not using the camera, by not giving certain things. It creates a sense of unease, that makes you feel, 'this could be a story I know very well, but somehow I'm looking at it and I don't think I know it very well at all.'
The haircut that Joel Edgerton wears while playing Narvel Roth in this movie is officially known as an undercut (long and swept back on the top while buzzed short on the sides) but is colloquially known as the "Hitler Youth" or the "Nazi Youth" for its strong association and popularity with the youth organization of the Nazi Party in Germany before and during World War II. Though in the twenty-first century the haircut is also worn by many people with no associations with Nazism or fascism, many articles have noted its rise in popularity among far-Right, Neo-fascist, and white supremacist leaders (for example, "A Haircut Returns From the 1930s" by Alex Williams, published in the New York Times on November 15, 2011; "Does This Haircut Make Me Look Like a Nazi?" by Monica Hesse and Dan Zak, published in the Washington Post on November 30, 2016; and "This Wildly Popular Haircut Has a Serious Neo-Nazi Problem" by Scott Christian, published in Esquire Magazine in August 2017).
The title has a double meaning. "Master Gardener" designates a certification program, generally under the auspices of universities in the United States and Canada, providing intensive horticultural training to individuals who then go on to use that knowledge of plants in professional or volunteer contexts. But "master" is also used here in the context of "master race," the false, pseudo-scientific Nazi worldview that held that so-called "Aryans" (the Nazis' historical label for blonde, blue-eyed people of German, non-Jewish lineage) were superior to any other groups, especially to Jewish people.