Lions For Lambs - Production

Production

Matthew Michael Carnahan was inspired to write the script when, while channel surfing trying to find a USC Trojans football game, he saw a news report about a Humvee that had flipped into an Iraqi river, drowning about five U.S. soldiers. Carnahan considered it an awful way to die, and "couldn’t get past it fast enough", considering he was too indifferent, "talking so much and not doing a damn thing", and "the same hypocrite that I so can’t stand in our country, the kind of people that will flip right past the news to get to Access Hollywood". He first considered turning it into a stage play, but the military scenes, in particular the helicopter ones, made him turn it into a film screenplay. The character of Todd Hayes was inspired by Carnahan himself during college.

When Robert Redford read the script, he got very interested, considering it smart as opposed to Hollywood's many "straight-out entertainment" projects, and also tricky due to the three stories "that seem to be disparate but are connected and have to come together in a vortex at the end", and that needed to be represented in a way the movie "wouldn't be categorized as a lefty film". Redford considered that the movie's focus was for audiences "to be entertained in a way that made them think."

An Irish newspaper claimed that "The name of the film is derived from a remark made by a German officer during World War I, comparing British soldiers' bravery with the calculated criminality of their commanders". While several reviewers in the UK have criticized the film for misquoting the commonly used phrase of "lions led by donkeys", in an article written for The Times on the origin of the title, Brian Dimuccio and Dino Vindeni claimed that:

One such composition included the observation, 'Nowhere have I seen such Lions led by such Lambs.' While the exact provenance of this quotation has been lost to history, most experts agree it was written during the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest clashes in modern warfare. While some military archivists credit the author as an anonymous infantryman, others argue that the source was none other than General Max von Gallwitz, Supreme Commander (sic) of the German forces. In either case, it is generally accepted to be a derivation of Alexander the Great’s proclamation, 'I am never afraid of an army of Lions led into battle by a Lamb. I fear more the army of Lambs who have a Lion to lead them.'

Though Lions for Lambs was the first United Artists venture since Cruise and Paula Wagner attained control, executives billed the film as a "Robert Redford vehicle." Filming began on January 29, 2007, and Redford considered the movie "the tightest schedule I’ve ever worked with," with barely a year between announcement and release.