Frantisek Vlácil not only had the clothes painstakingly researched and hand-sewn, he had the cast live in the forest for the two years of shooting so they could get into the 13th century mindset.
This film is the best Czech film of all time according to a 1998 poll of filmmakers and critics from the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
This film has a 100% rating based on 13 critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.
Before production started, Frantisek Vlácil and Frantisek Pavlícek had to transfer the novel into screenplay. The text of the book was linguistically difficult and the transfer took a few years. The whole works on Marketa Lazarová (1967) took seven years.