Production notes

The idea of parallel lives had been explored in earlier films such as Run Lola Run (1998) and Sliding Doors (1998), which influenced Jaco Van Dormael's writing of Mr. Nobody. Unlike those films, however, this one has philosophical underpinnings inspired by scientific tomes on chaos theory and the butterfly effect, pigeon superstition, and the space-time continuum. Van Dormael stated: "My starting point was a 12-minute short I made in 1982 called È pericoloso sporgersi. A kid runs behind a train with two possible choices: to go with his mother or with his father. From there we follow two possible futures. I started one version based on the fact that a woman jumps or doesn't jump on a train. Then Sliding Doors by Peter Howitt came out, followed by Run Lola Run by Tom Tykwer. I had to find something else. And that's when I realised that the story I was trying to tell was not binary, that I was above all interested by the multiplicity and complexity of choices. With this screenplay I wanted to make the viewer feel the abyss that is the infinity of possibilities. Beyond this, I wanted to find a different way of telling a story. I wanted the gaze of the child on his future to meet the gaze of the old man he has become on his past. I wanted to talk about complexity through cinema, which is a simplifying medium. While reality around us is more and more complex, the information is more and more succinct, political speeches are more and more simplistic. What interests me is complexity. Not the simple answers, which are reassuring but bound to be false." Describing the scale of the film, the director said, "My producers don't like me saying it, but it's really a big-budget experimental film about the many different lives one person can live, depending on the choices he makes. It's about the infinite possibilities facing any person. There are no good or bad choices in life. It's simply that each choice will create another life for you. What's interesting is to be alive." While producing the film, Van Dormael took the unique step of publishing his screenplay.

The film is Van Dormael's first feature since The Eighth Day in 1996. He began trying to make Mr. Nobody in 2001, but production on the project, his first English-language feature, did not start until 2007. Regarding the decision to not film in one of the languages of his native Belgium, the director said: "The story came to me in English. It's a story set over very long distances and time frames. One of the strands of the plot is about a kid who must choose between living with his mother in Canada or his father in England. There are also some incredible English-speaking actors I wanted to work with." Van Dormael began preparing for production on Mr. Nobody in February 2007, and Sarah Polley was the first actor to be cast. Jared Leto was later cast in the primary role of Nemo Nobody. The production budget for Mr. Nobody was €33 million (US$47 million), making it the most expensive Belgian film ever made. The budget was approved before casting was done based on Van Dormael's involvement and the strength of his script. Half of the budget was provided by the film's French producer, Philippe Godeau, through his production company, Pan-Européenne, and the other half was provided by distributors Wild Bunch and Pathé. Production took place throughout 2007, lasting 120 days and traveling to Belgium, Germany, and Canada. Scenes were filmed on location in Montreal, Canada, and at Babelsberg Studios in Berlin, Germany. Van Dormael said: "I think the film needed that for these multiple lives. Each time a new style of setting is required. And each life is filmed in a different style, with a different grammar for the camera, the colours, the decor. At the same time, if all the styles have to be very contrasted, they knock together by fusing." The three lives that Nemo Nobody experiences were separated by color-coding and musical cues. Each life's design was also based on the work of British photographer Martin Parr.

Van Dormael hired visual effects supervisor Louis Morin, known for his work in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), to create visual effects for Mr. Nobody. All five hundred visual effects shots were produced in Quebec by local companies. Modus FX announced having delivered 121 digital visual effects shots for the film. The company was entrusted with complex sequences that could not be captured on film, some involving the digital reproduction of entire cities, villages, and other-worldly settings, and others involving complex transitions between the different worlds and multiple lives of Nemo Nobody. Their post-production contributions involved 37 digital artists and technicians across a six-month period. A long list of software (including Autodesk's Softimage and Maya, Side Effects' Houdini, and The Foundry's Nuke) and the creation of a multitude of in-house tools, programs, and techniques were required for the shots delivered.

Like Jaco Van Dormael's previous films, the score for Mr. Nobody was written by his older brother, Pierre Van Dormael. For the film, Pierre worked on simple themes and out-of-sync loops, "a mixture of superficial simplicity and underlying complexity." He wrote themes that overlapped to form new ones, each theme continuing to exist while being mixed with the others. The director did not want the music to be overtly emotional, so he and Pierre chose a minimalist orchestration, more often than not just a single guitar. Jaco said: "We wanted the instrument and the player to be felt. This stance actually sums up the whole adventure: a maximalist project with a minimalist approach." Mr. Nobody was the last film Pierre worked on before his death in 2008, and his music won the Magritte Award for Best Original Score in 2012. The soundtrack features songs by Pierre Van Dormael, Buddy Holly, Hans Zimmer, Otis Redding, Eurythmics, Pixies, Wallace Collection, Nena, Ella Fitzgerald, and The Andrews Sisters, as well as versions of "Mr. Sandman" performed by The Chordettes, The King Brothers, Emmylou Harris, and Gob, and recordings of compositions by Erik Satie and Benjamin Britten, among others.

Mr. Nobody opened in 36 theaters in Belgium, debuting in fourth place at the box office and ranking first among new releases, with a per-theater average of $6,331—the third highest after Sherlock Holmes and Invictus. The film remained in theaters for 23 weeks, ultimately selling 100,000 admissions in the country. It became the second highest-grossing film of 2010 from Belgium, surpassed only by A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures. In France, Mr. Nobody debuted at number eight at the box office, screening in 150 theaters. It had the smallest release of the week in terms of the number of theaters, alongside Armored. The film concluded its theatrical run in two weeks, selling a total of 142,500 admissions. A writer for RTBF described this as a respectable result for a film shown on only 150 screens, while also observing that the limited release affected its overall box office performance. Mr. Nobody grossed an estimated $1.9 million in Belgium and France and $1.6 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $3.5 million. The film received a limited release in twelve additional markets outside Belgium and France, including Russia ($615,719), Poland ($334,114), Spain ($322,056), Finland ($217,774), and Germany ($188,088). In Russia and the CIS, it became the highest-grossing limited released film of the year and the third highest-grossing of all time, despite being screened in only four theaters. An opinion piece in The Numbers argued that the film's limited theatrical release, combined with its simultaneous availability on streaming platforms, failed to capitalize on its potential earnings and ultimately fell short of recovering its €33 million production budget. Commenting on the film's theatrical release, Van Dormael remarked, "Financially, it was a failure, but artistically speaking, I think it's the best thing I can do in my life." According to the Centre du Cinéma et de l'Audiovisuel, the box office performance of Mr. Nobody, alongside A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures, contributed to a 25% rise in attendance for films from Belgium in 2010.

Mr. Nobody's distribution on home media was instrumental in expanding its viewership and establishing its status as a cult classic. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the release on DVD and Blu-ray allowed the film to reach a significantly broader audience compared to its limited theatrical run. Streaming and video-on-demand services further amplified its visibility, driven by word of mouth and reflected in favorable rankings across multiple regions. Additionally, Digital Trends, a platform specializing in streaming analytics, listed Mr. Nobody among the best science fiction films available on Amazon Prime Video. According to JustWatch, a guide to streaming content with access to data from more than 20 million users around the world, Mr. Nobody ranked as the third most-watched film in Belgium upon its digital release. It performed strongly internationally as well, reaching the top spot in Italy, third in Canada, sixth in France and the Netherlands, ninth in the United States, thirteenth in South Korea, and eighteenth in Austria and the United Kingdom. Despite the circulation of pirated copies priced at as little as one yen in parts of Asia, the film became the most-streamed title in Japan during its first week of digital release.

Upon its premiere at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Mr. Nobody was positively received with a ten-minute standing ovation from the audience. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 68% rating from 31 critics and a weighted average rating of 6.58/10; the site's consensus reads: "Mr. Nobody's narrative tangles may bedevil as much as they entertain, but its big ambitions and absorbing visuals make for an intriguing addition to director Jaco Van Dormael's filmography." At Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received a score of 63, based on 10 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Jennie Punter of The Globe and Mail praised the film: Van Dormael holds this fractured fairy tale together by giving it an emotional core and delivers two hours of time travel with a playful spirit and at a mostly hyperkinetic pace, sprinkling it with amusing side journeys and sometimes letting a scene unfold at a more natural tempo. Bruce Kirkland of Jam! gave the film four stars out of five and wrote: "Expect the unexpected. Try to answer the unanswerable question that writer-director Van Dormael poses. It is a worthwhile exercise." He also described Leto's acting as a "marvelously full-blooded, brain-spinning, tour-de-force performance." Ken Eisner from The Georgia Straight summarized the film as "a dazzling feat of philosophical fancy, and it attempts nothing less than the summing up of an entire life, and an epoch or two, with its free-spinning take on recent human history as projected into possible futures." Niels Matthijs, writing for Twitch Film, stated that "It's astounding how van Dormael turns each scene into a unique little cinematic event. There is hardly filler here, no scenes to drag out the running time or to fill some gaps in between other climaxes. Every scene matters and every scene is made to look like it matters. The director uses all means to his disposal to keep the viewer engaged and interested in the life of the main protagonist, Nemo Nobody." Fred Topel, writing for Screen Junkies, praised the film's artistry, saying: "All of Nemo's lives are painful. No matter what he chooses, he experiences heartbreak, death of loved ones, his own death, and clinical depression. My future seems brighter, but the film makes the strong point that every experience is worthwhile. The goal isn't to choose the easiest path. It's to live." Chris Holt from Starburst magazine wrote that "Mr. Nobody is a film that is remarkable by its very existence and that in itself is something to be happy about. You may love it you may hate it, but you can bet that you will never forget it." Exclaim!'s Robert Bell called the film "a powerful movie about what it means to be alive." Boyd van Hoeij of Variety magazine was more critical, writing: "Though a lot of it is well written and directed and, quite often, funny or poignant, the individual scenes rarely become part of a larger whole." He praised Leto's acting, stating that "The closest the film comes to having a gravitational center are in the scenes set in 2092. What makes them soar is not the imaginative staging of the future, but Leto's performance. His acting talent really comes into full view in his scenes as the last dying man on Earth." He also praised Regbo and Temple, saying that "Regbo, as the teenage Nemo, and Juno Temple, as the teenage Anna, are impressive, bringing the hormonal battles of adolescence vividly to life." Film critic Eric Lavallée listed Regbo as one of his "Top 10 New Faces & Voices" of the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, noting that "newbie Toby Regbo might easily be Mr. Nobody's most 'alive' character. Playing Nemo at age 16, the actor is mostly paired with Juno Temple – their unique love story is the film's heart pumping portions and plays a lot better than the artery clogging other brushes of romance." AlloCiné, a French cinema website, gave the film an average of three out of five stars, based on a survey of 24 reviews. Xavier Leherpeur from Le Nouvel Observateur described it as "a fiction of sterile ramifications, weighed down by a script the labyrinthine constructions of which poorly conceal the poverty of inspiration". Pierre Fornerod from Ouest-France wrote that "Van Dormael plays with chance and coincidence. The demonstration is long and heavy, but aesthetically, is superb."