Director Nicolas Roeg has said of this movie: "I was initially interested in a character who wanted to satisfy an all-consuming desire...'that's what I want'...but when he gets it what happens after his brief ecstatic moment? Nothing more than left over life to kill."
The character of Mayakofsky is a thinly disguised name for real-life mob boss Meyer Lansky. Source novelist Marshall Houts proposed the theory that American gangster boss Meyer Lansky was behind the killing of (Harry) Oakes (the real-life person on whom Jack McCann was based), due to Oakes's resistance to casino gambling in the Bahamas.
Leonard Maltin has commented that this movie was "shelved by its studio, (then) sporadically released in (the U.S. in) 1985". According to Senses of Cinema, this movie was "produced under the aegis of David Begelman's troubled reign at MGM/UA, Eureka (1983) was shelved for almost two years and then dumped into a handful of cities."
When Jack finds the gold, the music is from the beginning of Wagner's Das Rheingold.
Although this movie has strong references to Quarto potere (1941), there were no connections in Nicolas Roeg and Paul Mayersberg's minds between the semi-invented character of Jack McCann and the real-life William Randolph Hearst, the connection was instead to Orson Welles, who struck gold with Quarto potere (1941) and then paid for the rest of his life with despair. The story that interested Roeg and Mayersberg was what it does to someone to get what he or she wants and then find that his or her life is over afterwards because there's nothing left to get.