Abraham Polonsky said to a USC film class at the time that he purposely shot and edited the manhunt sequences with characters moving in all directions across the screen, rather than in the usual way wherein both runners and pursuers would move in the same direction across the shots (i.e., left to right) to enhance the impression of urgent suspense in a chase. Instead, Polonsky was looking for a different feel for the audience, of the characters wandering, feeling their way through the landscape. He implied he was willing to sacrifice some suspense to externalize the characters' confusion. He also said that for Katharine Ross' brief, artfully lit nude shot, he exposed the film correctly but then produced a high-contrast copy of the same film frames with deep blacks and transparent lights, then bi-packed both pieces of films together to rephotograph. The high-contrast overlay ensured that the shadows on Ross' body were black--so that the image could not reveal more in the shadows than it was supposed to.
Katharine Ross and Robert Redford had played star crossed lovers in that other western, released a month earlier than this one, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
This was the first film to be directed by Abraham Polonsky for 21 years, since his debut "Force Of Evil". He had been a victim of blacklisting.
Although it's not listed in the IMDb Filming Locations, most of the exteriors in the first half of the film were shot at the Malibu Creek State Park. The hillsides should look familiar to fans of both the movie and TV series MASH, which were both filmed in the same area.
President William Taft was the featured speaker on April 16, 1912, at the San Bernardino Opera House, located at Court and D Streets.