Jamie Bell was going through puberty at the time of filming. Some of his dialogue had to be post-synched as his voice had broken. And the opening scene in which he jumps up and down on a bed to T. Rex's "Cosmic Dancer" was shot over a lengthy period of time. For the latter takes, Bell had acquired hair on his legs and had to have them shaved.
Jamie Bell took ballet and other dance classes while in secondary school, which caused him to often be ridiculed by his peers. He used some of these experiences as inspiration while playing Billy Elliot.
When Sir Elton John first saw this movie at the Cannes Film Festival, he immediately pitched the idea of making a stage musical of it to director Stephen Daldry.
Cinematographer Brian Tufano deliberately shot the mining village in a claustrophobic manner to emphasize how close-knit the community was, and how frustrating it could be for a creative talent like Billy. For the dance scenes, however, he opened up the field of focus to show how liberating dance was for Billy.
A January 2020 New York Times article about the latest touring production of Matthew Bourne's "Swan Lake" profiled four male dancers in the show. Three of the four men (who were between the ages of 22 and 34 when the article was published) mentioned the movie Billy Elliot as a major influence on their interests in dance and their decisions to become dancers; and the article noted that none of the men "experienced much prejudice when they began to dance, perhaps because of what [the former Guardian dance critic Judith] Mackrell called 'the Billy Elliot effect.'"