Director Martin Ritt was forever known after this movie as the man who tamed Orson Welles. During filming, Ritt drove Welles to a local swamp, kicked him out of the car and forced him to find his own way back.
The scorching Louisiana heat didn't help Orson Welles's temperament on the set. "He was having terrible difficulty living in his own skin," said Dame Angela Lansbury. "He was very, very heavy. We were working under dreadful conditions of heat and he was perspiring, and he seemed to have a lot of very thick make-up on." Part of that heavy make-up was a prosthetic nose that Welles wore, something he often did for his acting roles. The heat made Welles sweat so heavily that the nose would often come unglued and ruin the shot.
Orson Welles was only 42 during filming, but was cast as a 61 year-old man due to his weight. He convincingly played similar older men in Moby Dick (1956) and Touch of Evil (1958).
Orson Welles had a rough time making this movie and caused plenty of trouble on set. Used to being in control of his own projects, it was hard for him to do things someone else's way. According to Dame Angela Lansbury, "He was always nudging and pushing for things and wanted to change lines, but had to be carefully handled so that he didn't always get his way because his way wasn't necessarily the best way for everybody else in the scene." Welles irritated his co-stars by overlapping his own lines with their dialogue, ad-libbing, and mumbling to the point where his lines were barely comprehensible. "There was something you couldn't resist about Orson", said Lansbury, "even though he was a son-of-a-bitch at times. I mean, there's no question about it, he was very difficult." Joanne Woodward added in a 2001 interview, "Orson had a hard time. It must have been a terrible, terrible feeling for him to be confronted by all of these young hot shots who thought they were so great because they came from New York and the Actors Studio. It was a problem." It should be added, however, that when Peter Bogdanovich asked Welles about the movie a dozen or so years later, the actor insisted that he had really liked working with Paul Newman, Woodward and, in particular, Lansbury, who played his mistress. He was, however, dismissive of director Martin Ritt and thought the film itself trivial.
The success of this movie helped Martin Ritt re-establish himself as a major director following his five-year blacklisting from Hollywood.