For years, this had been a dream project for several high-profile actors and directors. John Huston tried to set it up several times, and Burt Lancaster desperately wanted to play the aging military martinet. At one stage, Robert Altman almost got it made with Roy Scheider, Julie Christie and Greta Scacchi starring, but funding collapsed at the last moment.
Howard Hawks quipped, early in Ernest Hemingway's career, that he adapted Hemingway's worst novel into a movie to improve it, which was 'To Have and Have Not' starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Years later, 'Across the River and Into the Trees' had taken the place as being Hemingway's worst book, according to both critics and fans. He received horrible reviews and low sales... but quickly made a comeback with the novella 'The Old Man and the Sea', which also has an old man having flashbacks about his youth to rediscover his strengths but with action instead of romantic melodrama.
Liev Schreiber and Danny Huston both played Orson Welles: Schreiber in "RKO 281" (1999) Huston in "Fade to Black" (2006).
Pierce Brosnan was tied to the project for several years.
The title is the same as the novel from which the film was adapted, and is a reference to the dying words of American Civil War Confederate General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson: "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees."