The U-20 set was the original U-96 set used in Le Bateau (1981). The Type U-19 of World War I and Type VIIC of World War II had similar internal dimensions. The Lusitania scenes were filmed with full-scale sections of the ship off the coast of South Africa while the U-20 scenes were filmed at Bavaria Studios in Munich using the then-newly refurbished 25-year-old U-boat set, studio model and full-size prop originally built for the West German war film Das Boot (1981).
The physical appearance in this production of Kenneth Cranham is probably more influenced by the appearance of White Star Line Captain Edward John Smith (famous as the captain of the Titanic) than by the appearance of the real Lusitania captain William Turner, whom Cranham is portraying. Unlike Smith, who's white beard is famous from still photographs and from Bernard Hill's portrayal, surviving photographs of Turner invariably show him as clean-shaven.
The character of actress Dorothy Taylor (played by Karen Haacke) is probably more a nod to Dorothy Gibson, a film actress who famously survived the Titanic disaster. There was a film actress about the Lusitania, French-born Rita Jolivet, who (like Gibson) was later persuaded to appear in a film depicting the sea disaster that she had survived.
This is the second TV movie about a shipwreck that actor Kevin Otto has appeared in, after the 2005 Hallmark miniseries The Poseidon Adventure (2005).
Lusitania: Murder on the Atlantic (2007) (also known as Lusitania: Murder on the Atlantic, and, in German: Der Untergang der Lusitania: Tragödie eines Luxusliners) is an English-German Made-for-TV docu-drama produced in 2007. This 90-minute film is a dramatization of the sinking of the RMS Lusitania on 7 May 1915 by a German U-boat, U-20.