This film is based upon the 2014 novel "The Black-Eyed Blonde" by Benjamin Black, not one of Raymond Chandler's original Marlowe works.
A poster for "The Black Eyed Blonde," a fictional movie (with the same name as the novel upon which "Marlowe" is based) can be seen in Claire's office, at the end of the movie.
This is the 11th screen version of Philip Marlowe (not counting TV movies as Poodle Springs (1998), etc.). The ten previous were: Hired Wife (1934), Murder, My Sweet (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Lady in the Lake (1946), The Brasher Doubloon (1947), Marlowe (1969), The Long Goodbye (1973), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Big Sleep (1978) and Lacson, batas ng Navotas (1992).
In a 2023 interview with Collider, Neil Jordan spoke about creating a fictional version of 1930s Los Angeles in an unlikely locale: "...the main challenge of this was realizing some version of Los Angeles. Los Angeles 1938 doesn't exist. So I said to the producers, 'Look, why don't we look around the hills of Barcelona so we can get some feeling for what it could have been, or could possibly be?' So we built an alternative version of Los Angeles, almost like an [alternate] reality version of Los Angeles. We found an abandoned paper factory, which we turned into an entire studio. We found Marlowe's house, we found canyons that could be Benedict Canyon and Laurel Canyon. We recreated the entire city, really, in a different place, which is cool. Lovely to do."