James Best initially turned down playing the role of the Texan because he objected to the profanity in the script. However, he eventually agreed to play the part after he learned that both William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones were attached to the movie. Best put ice cubes under his cowboy hat to convey that his character was always sweating.
In his 1982 book 'Adventures in the Screen Trade,' William Goldman called an advance screening of this movie "the most violent sneak reaction of recent years... the audience actually got up and tried to physically abuse the studio personnel present among them."
One of Quentin Tarantino's favorite movies, with the director naming his distributing company, Rolling Thunder Pictures, after the film.
In his 2022 book Cinema Speculation, Tarantino dedicated a chapter to Rolling Thunder, reflecting on the differences between the original script by Paul Schrader, the rewrite by Heywood Gould and the changes to the script made by star William Devane.
In his 2022 book Cinema Speculation, Tarantino dedicated a chapter to Rolling Thunder, reflecting on the differences between the original script by Paul Schrader, the rewrite by Heywood Gould and the changes to the script made by star William Devane.
The filmmakers were told by producers to make the scene where the criminals torture Rane as bloody as "open heart surgery," with his hand being shown being mangled and ripped up with a huge amount of gore. They expected the MPAA to demand edits and were prepared to appeal a potential X rating, but to their surprise the ratings board gave the film an R rating and did not make any requests for changes. The torture scene was wrongly reported to have been edited under MPAA pressure (a lot of gore and focus on the torn-apart hand was removed from the final cut), when it was edited because preview audiences were horrified and sickened by the images and submitted comment cards saying that they would never recommend a movie with a scene like that to their friends or families.