Trivia
When this movie was being made, the real Josef Mengele was still alive in São Paulo, Brazil. He died in 1979, shortly after the movie's release.
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Bruno Ganz - who played Dr. Bruckner - actually played Adolf Hitler himself several years later in Downfall.
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Gregory Peck and The Big Country co-star Charlton Heston both played the infamous Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele. Peck played him in The Boys from Brazil whilst Heston played him in Rua Alguem 5555: My Father.
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Publicity for this picture stated that this movie was the first villainous role of Gregory Peck's career. Peck felt that his portrayal of Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele was the only completely unsympathetic role he ever performed.
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The character Ezra Liebermann was called Yakov Liebermann in the original book. The character was based on real-life Nazis hunter Simon Wiesenthal.
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Gregory Peck replaced George C. Scott. Scott was cast as Mengele but pulled out before principal photography began.
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For his role as a notorious Nazi, actor Gregory Peck had his famous "widow's peak" hairline shaved off, his eyebrows cropped, put on a little Hitler mustache and then had added white face paint make-up. Publicity for the picture stated that Peck bore an uncanny resemblance to photographs of the real Josef Mengele which had at the time been recently smuggled out of South America.
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The nickname of Gregory Peck's character Dr. Joseph Mengele was "The Angel of Death". The number of people Mengele was said to have killed during the holocaust was 2 2/3 million.
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The film was made and released about three years after its source novel of the same name by Ira Levin had been first published in 1976.
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Playing a Nazi in this 20th Century Fox film was James Mason who had been well-known for portraying General Rommel in Fox's earlier The Desert Rats and The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel.
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Austria's The Kölnbrein Dam doubled for the Swedish dam where an assassination sequences occurs. The dam was under construction at the time of principal photography and was then not as yet a functioning dam.
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Director Franklin J. Schaffner previously directed the World War II movie Patton which won several Academy Awards including the Oscar for Best Picture. The Boys from Brazil was the only other picture related to the Second World War that Schaffner directed.
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The film was nominated for three Academy Awards at the 1979 Oscars but failed to win any statuettes. Ironically, it was Laurence Olivier playing the Nazi hunter and not Gregory Peck in the meatier lead role who was nominated for Best Actor.
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The picture lensed in four countries: Austria, Britain, the USA and Portugal the latter doubling for Paraguay.
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James Mason reportedly was not interested in the script for "The Boys from Brazil", until he found out that his friends "Greg" and "Larry" were already signed-up. "Greg", of course, was Gregory Peck, and "Larry" was Sir Laurence Olivier.
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