After acquiring the property, Freedman met with director Steven Spielberg for advice on how to make the project into a documentary film.

Morris had studied the history and philosophy of science at Princeton and later Berkeley, so was familiar with many of the topics in Hawking's book.

Although Hawking had an aversion to featuring his personal life in the film, Morris saw A Brief History of Time as being as much a biography as a science text, and much of his directing and editing work was dedicated to finding ways to depict ideas from theoretical physics and cosmology and then connect those ideas with details from the life of Hawking.

Hawking's mother, Isobel, is the first person we hear from in the movie, and near the end she describes her son as "a seeker" for truth.

Morris says he had Glass compose the score before showing him the movie; instead, he would give him relevant cues like "falling into a black hole" or "event horizon.