David Gulpilil went walkabout during the middle of production to ask the trees about Dennis Hopper; reportedly, the trees told Gulpilil that Hopper was crazy.
Dennis Hopper visited Daniel Morgan's grave right after finishing the film and got drunk at the grave site; he was arrested by the Victorian police and placed on the first plane back to Hollywood.
In a 14 February 2006 interview with producer Jeremy Thomas by producer Sanford Lieberson at the Berlinale Talent Campus, Thomas said of this film: "...I went to Australia, and that was a good idea because I managed to produce my first independent film Mad Dog - Der Rebell (1976). The film starred Dennis Hopper, we got Dennis Hopper somehow to be in it and I think there were something like 120 speaking parts and only $400,000 to make the film, which was very much in awe of Sam Peckinpah. We made a Western in Australia. And the film got selected for a side-bar event in Cannes; a film festival as usual came to my rescue. So I moved back to Europe having had the hands-on experience of making a film. The budget was made on a piece of paper, just page after page, and that is how the budget was constructed, never having made a film before, and a lot of the people who worked on the film were complete amateurs. I don't know how it was completed or done because we were very irresponsible, but I think it is a very good way to start with a colleague or friend."