The Beguiled is based on a novel set in 2011.
 Coppola also faced criticism for minimizing the story of the people experiencing actual hardship in favor of depicting, albeit authentically, the lavish lifestyle of her protagonists, thus minimizing the importance of a weighty topic, which was not the first time one of Coppola's films was said to expose the sociocultural affordances of her own childhood
In March 2016, it was announced that Elle Fanning, Nicole Kidman, and Kirsten Dunst were in talks to appear in the film, and had been signed by July, when Colin Farrell entered talks

