Richard Burton turned down an offer to play King Lear on stage in Canada in order to make this movie.
In his 2018 memoirs, Jon Plowman wrote that Richard Burton hated learning his lines. He "liked playing Catholic Priests because when he is in the confessional he can have all the pages of the script stuck to the wall behind the camera."
Apparently, major movie studios were not interested in making this movie, so Producer Elliott Kastner raised the finances himself and Richard Burton dropped his price to only a small fee to play the lead part of Father Goddard.
The exteriors of the Catholic school featured in this film was played by Ellesmere College, near Ellesmere in Shropshire in England. Interiors of the school were filmed at Pinewood Studios. Many of the boy students of Ellesmere College appeared in this movie as extras.
After working together on The Wicker Man (1973), Sir Christopher Lee and Screenwriter Anthony Shaffer planned this as their next project in 1973.
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