Katharine Hepburn was bemused by co-star John Wayne's tendency to argue with everybody, especially the director, during filming. At the party to celebrate the last day of filming she told him, "I'm glad I didn't know you when you had two lungs, you must have been a real bastard. Losing a hip has mellowed me, but you!"
Director Stuart Millar insisted on so many takes that eventually John Wayne snapped, "God damn it Stuart, there's only so many times we can say these awful lines before they stop making any sense at all."
According to Michael Munn's 2003 biography "John Wayne: The Man Behind the Myth", Richard Jordan later admitted he decided to overplay his part because he thought the movie was going to flop, and if anybody paid to see it then it would only be for the two stars. He also said he felt that Katharine Hepburn was about to die at any minute - ironically, she outlived him by a decade. However it is doubtful whether Munn really met the celebrities he claimed to have interviewed, and his books have been dismissed as the creation of a serial fantasist.
John Wayne found making the film to be very difficult, particularly since he had just finished a grueling shoot on Brannigan (1975) and recovered from pneumonia.
Although John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn refer to Strother Martin as "Old Man", he was in fact twelve years younger than them.