Director Andrei Tarkovsky spent about a year shooting all of the exterior scenes with cinematographer Georgi Rerberg using Kodak 5247 film. This film stock was newer to Soviet laboratories of the time, and some of the original negatives were destroyed by a processing error at the laboratory. Part of the film had to be shot again with a new cinematographer, Aleksandr Knyazhinskiy. This contributed to the film's two-part narrative structure. Allegedly, the newly shot footage strayed farther away from the source novel Roadside Picnic, and had a different look. Asked about this, director Tarkovsky said "no mother gives birth to the same child twice."
The Zone of the film was inspired by a nuclear accident that took place near Chelyabinsk in 1957. Several hundred square kilometers were polluted by fallout and abandoned. There was no official mention of this "forbidden zone" at the time.
It is said that the rushes of the first version of the film were kept by editor Lyudmila Feyginova in her home for years. They were destroyed by a fire that also claimed her life.
To allow changes to the color tone of a long strip of film over an extended take, director Andrei Tarkovsky built a long film processing vat which had different temperatures along the way.
The film contains 142 shots in 163 minutes, with an average shot length of more than one minute and many shots lasting for more than four minutes.