Roger Corman had been interested in making a film about Manfred von Richthofen for a number of years. He felt that the Baron was the last true knight, an aristocratic warrior with a code of honor, and wanted to show how the Baron's way of thinking was archaic compared to the wholesale slaughter of World War I. Another thing he wanted to do was to contrast the Baron with the man who had been credited with shooting him down, Canadian RAF pilot Roy Brown, although it is now considered all but certain by historians, doctors, and ballistics experts that Richthofen was actually killed by an AA machine gunner firing from the ground.