Trivia / Cross of Iron

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• Backed by the Pentagon: The T-34 tanks seen in the film were supplied by them. All the Russian extras are also obviously played by members of the Yugoslav People's Army (they speak Serbo-Croatian).
• California Doubling: The film was largely shot in Yugoslavia.
• Dawson Casting: At 48, James Coburn was widely felt to be too old to play Corporal Steiner. The man his character was based on, Johann Schwerdfeger, was only 28 in the summer of 1943. In the book Steiner's age is given as 25.
• Doing It for the Art: Sam Peckinpah used $90,000 from his own money into the picture so that technicians can be paid after the production financial problems.
• Duelling Movies: With A Bridge Too Far, another British-made auteur film chronicling famous military defeats in World War II. Maximilian Schell was in both movies.
• Fake Nationality:
  • Steiner (played by American James Coburn) and Brandt and Kiesel (played by Britons James Mason and David Warner) as German soldiers. Native German actors make up a decent size of the cast though, notably Maximilian Schell, who plays Stransky.
  • The Russian characters are mostly played by Yugoslav actors.
• International Coproduction: This was a joint Anglo-German production between EMI Films and ITC Entertainment of London and Rapid Films GmbH from Munich.
• Throw It In!: Maximilian Schell's stumbling by the railway track in the final scene was actually an on set accident during filming and not scripted (Sam Peckinpah simply hadn't enough film left to retake the sequence).
• Troubled Production:
  • Location shooting was mostly done in Yugoslavia, with the Yugoslav government agreeing to provide the period accurate tanks and machine guns the production needed. Unfortunately, according to James Coburn, because only a fraction of the $4 million budget promised by producer Wolf C. Hartwig was available when filming began, half the equipment was still held up in negotiations when the cameras started rolling, causing severe delays to the shooting schedule.
  • Sam Peckinpah's alcoholism was as bad as ever, with his preferred drink for this shoot being 180° proof Slivovitz (Šljivovica). Every two to three weeks, he would go on a binge, and the time he needed to sober up again resulted in lost shooting days.
  • The production delays naturally led to budget overruns to the tune of $2 million. On July 6, 1976, eighty-nine days into the shoot and with the last of the money spent, Hartwig and his co-producer Alex Winitsky tried to halt the production before the final scene had been filmed. The original ending was expected to take three days to film in an abandoned rail yard, and the special effects teams had already spent several days wiring pyrotechnics for the shoot. Coburn was so annoyed by the producers' attempted interference that he had them thrown off the set and worked with Peckinpah and his co-star, Maximilian Schell, to improvise the ending that went into the finished film. Once the final scene was shot, the cast and crew packed their luggage and caught their trains or planes home, as there was no money left for a wrap party.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Robert Shaw turned down the part of Corporal Steiner after a dispute over money.
  • According to James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson was going to have an unspecified small role in the film, but had to drop out due to scheduling difficulties.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: The film's ending is not the one in the script. The production had run out of money, so Sam Peckinpah got James Coburn to improvise.

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