A few years after making this film, Sterling Hayden was interviewed for a British magazine and insisted that Robert Fuest was his favorite director, the best he had ever worked with. As Hayden has only one scene in this film, and almost certainly took no longer than a couple of days to film it, perhaps less, and as he also spoke in the same interview about his work with Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Altman and Nicholas Ray, it may be that he was being sarcastic.
The original intention was that Timothy Dalton should play Jerry Cornelius and that Vanessa Redgrave should play Miss Brunner. The two actors were a romantic item at the time and appeared together many times in the 1970s, in stage plays and in the films Mary, Queen of Scots (1971) and Agatha (1979).