Gregory Peck initially blamed the poor reviews of his performance on the script, which he felt contained "too much prose from the novel". However, he later acknowledged that he had been too young for the part at 38, since Captain Ahab was supposed to be an old man at the end of his career (Ahab's age, as implied in the book's chapter "The Symphony", is 58). He added, "The film required more. At the time, I didn't have more in me." and apologized to the screenwriters. Director John Huston admitted he didn't want Peck as Ahab, but had spoken very highly of him & was very satisfied with his performance.
In a 1967 "Films in Review" interview, Gregory Peck voiced his dissatisfaction with John Huston's direction in this film. "I remember one scene on which all [Huston] said was 'Feel the camera on your face,' which merely confused me. And in an important scene in which I had a long speech beginning 'If there is a God, there must be a malevolent God,' I was told, 'Kid, if you ever deliver the goods this has to be the time.' Is that direction?"
Gregory Peck was later told by a Warner Brothers insider that John Huston had "conned" him into playing Captain Ahab. Huston had originally approached Peck telling him, "Nobody could do this part except you." Peck was so flattered by the director's confidence in him that he accepted a role he felt he was ill-suited for. Peck subsequently learned that Huston had never really wanted him to play Ahab at all, but was forced to by Warner Brothers executives, the Mirisch brothers, who told Huston they would not finance his dream project without a "bankable" star.
The whale "Moby Dick" was an 85-foot-long, steel-reinforced, rubberized construction. Two full models were made, costing approximately $30,000 each, and both were lost at sea during shooting, necessitating the construction of a third for the sequences shot in the Canary Islands. At one point, the towline of the third whale broke during filming and sailed into a fog with Gregory Peck on its back.
To create the desaturated pastel effect image of the movie, director of photography Oswald Morris used a unique dye transfer technique that uses broad-cut black and white matrices. This causes the separation, and contains the other two colors before recombining to create the desired effect. A silver layer was later added in the 4th pass.