Sofia Coppola began developing the story after staying at the Park Hyatt Tokyo while promoting her first feature, The Virgin Suicides (1999), forming the idea of two characters experiencing a 'romantic melancholy' there.

Coppola did not write a traditional script at first; she wrote 'little paragraphs' based on disparate impressions of her time in Tokyo, later adapting them into a 75-page screenplay that took six months to complete.

One of the first images Coppola included was her friend Fumihiro Hayashi performing a karaoke rendition of the Sex Pistols' 'God Save the Queen', which she had seen him perform while working in Tokyo.

Coppola drew on personal experience for Charlotte's character, including the strain in her own marriage to Spike Jonze, and cited J.D. Salinger's Franny Glass from Franny and Zooey as an inspiration.

The idea of Bob Harris shooting a Suntory whiskey ad came from Coppola's father Francis Ford Coppola and from Akira Kurosawa's real 1970s Suntory Whiskey commercial.

Coppola envisioned Bill Murray as Bob from the very beginning and pursued him for close to a year through phone messages, letters, and a friend, screenwriter Mitch Glazer, before he finally agreed over a restaurant meeting.

Murray never signed a formal contract for the film, leaving Coppola uncertain until days before shooting whether he would actually show up in Tokyo, even after she had already spent $1 million of the $4 million budget.

Coppola cast Scarlett Johansson, then 17, as Charlotte without an audition after remembering her performance in Manny & Lo and meeting her at a restaurant, despite initial worries she might look too young for a character in her twenties.

Principal photography lasted only 27 days starting September 29, 2002, using a small crew, minimal equipment, no filming permits on public streets, and real bystanders as extras in a 'run-and-gun', documentary-style approach.

Because most of the locally-hired Japanese crew could not communicate with Coppola in English, translations relied on a bilingual assistant director and gaffer, causing delays and at least one cultural misunderstanding where a restaurant owner, offended by the crew running late, cut the lights, prompting the location manager to resign.

Murray improvised much of his dialogue, including the Suntory photo-shoot scene where Coppola fed him celebrity names like 'Roger Moore' to react to spontaneously, since the sparse screenplay left many scene details unwritten.

The whispered line Bob says to Charlotte in the final scene was improvised by Murray and was never scripted; it is inaudible in the film because Coppola decided it should 'stay between the two of them' rather than dub in clear audio.

Cinematographer Lance Acord shot much of the film using available light, often two stops underexposed with high-speed Kodak film stocks, despite objections from Japanese electricians who worried the exposure would be insufficient.

Coppola listened to dream-pop mixes made by her friend Brian Reitzell while writing the script to help set its melancholic mood, and Reitzell later recruited My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields, largely inactive since 1991's Loveless, to write original songs during two months of overnight London recording sessions.

Lost in Translation was criticized by Asian American organizations for alleged racism and Orientalist stereotyping, leading Asia Media Watch to launch a 2004 nationwide petition campaign urging industry guilds to vote against the film at the 76th Academy Awards.

A spokesperson for the boycott campaign suggested it may have contributed to Bill Murray, previously the favorite, losing the Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Actor to Johnny Depp for Pirates of the Caribbean.

The film's opening shot of Charlotte in translucent panties is based on the photorealist paintings of John Kacere and has often been compared to Brigitte Bardot's introduction in the 1963 film Contempt.