The Wind and The Lion - Inspiration/Sources

Inspiration/Sources

Milius stated both in interviews and the DVD commentary that he was consciously echoing a number of classic adventure films and stories. He cites the famous British periodical Boy's Own, as well as the stories of Rudyard Kipling, as inspirations for the film. Milius' inspiration had come from reading an article by Barbara W. Tuchman about the Perdicaris incident in American Heritage magazine, and he found the story fascinating; he decided to adapt it into a screenplay once he figured how to make the story more cinematic — by making Ion Perdicaris a woman, Eden Pedecaris.

Milius also researched Rosita Forbes's biography of Raisuli, The Sultan of the Mountains (1924); much of the film's dialogue is appropriated almost word-for-word from Forbes's book. He took similar care in researching the scenes with Theodore Roosevelt.

In terms of film, 1930s adventure films such as Gunga Din and The Four Feathers provided inspiration for the film's style and storytelling technique. The use of children as protagonists is also inspired by the book and movie A High Wind in Jamaica, while the relationship between Raisuli and Eden is based on Rudolph Valentino's The Sheik. Raisuli's rescue of the Perdicarises on the beach is similar to another mounted sword-fighting scene in Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress, and the scene of Jennifer Perdicaris being cornered by Aldo Sambrell's character and kidnapped is a reference to The Searchers.

Perhaps most noticeably, the film inherits the cavalier attitudes towards imperialism, foreign policy and military intervention present in those movies — attitudes which were relatively unpopular in 1975 America, at the end of the Vietnam War. Perhaps surprisingly, Milius's apparent endorsement of imperialism and warfare was not attacked by critics, perhaps due to the film's supposedly satiric manner.

However, Milius also had inspiration from more recent films while making the movie. He based the film's cinematography, use of desert landscapes, and filming of battle scenes on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, also using many of the same sets, including the "Aqaba" set which had been constructed for Lean's film, here serving as the setting for the final, three-way battle between the Berbers, the Europeans and their Moroccan allies, and the Americans. The Bashaw's palace was the Palace of the Americas in Seville, having appeared in both Lawrence and Anthony Mann's El Cid. Another major influence is The Wild Bunch, which inspired the final confrontation between the American and German troops and the earlier scene where the Sultan test-fires his Maxim gun.