Tozeur
Once city sequences were completed the unit moved southwest to the town of Tozeur in the Sahara, a six-hour drive from El Mahdia. Near the country's southwestern border and only a few kilometers from Algeria, for centuries Tozeur has been a staging point for Bedouin caravans en route from the desert to the Mediterranean coast in the north. It was in the environs of Tozeur that the production found oases and a variety of desert landscapes crucial for the film's narrative.
"The color and quality of the sand, the light beige granules of the Sahara there that are so distinctive and recognizable, that kind of Lawrence of Arabia desert, is what we needed," says Stuart Craig. "The sand in the Moroccan desert is a darker red rock color resembling the deserts in the United States. The Sahara in Tunisia was just right."

One important location, 45 km from Tozeur, was the vast, dry salt lake called the Chott el Jerid which served as the Almásy-Madox expedition's base camp. Another was the undulating Sahara sand dunes close to the Chott. Littered with furrows made by the desert winds, the dunes look as if they have existed undisturbed forever.

"The most astounding thing about the desert was simply the silence," Kristin Scott Thomas says. "It had a special quality. It felt thick. Every breath and sigh you made, every rustle, every piece of clothing that brushed against you was amplified a hundred times."

in general, access to the locations was difficult and precarious as the filmmakers discovered during locations scouts. The production was filmed in the mountain oasis of Tamerza (3 km from the visible Algerian border and guarded outpost), part of the Djebel en Negueb range, an off-shoot of the Atlas Mountains. The narrow, winding road to Tamerza climbs beside a thousand meter high gorge which veers off into several hairpin turns sometimes slickly layered with mud especially after a rainfall.

Nearly as remote was the site of the entrance to the Cave of Swimmers. Located deep inside a rocky crevice at the summit of a hill outside the desert town of Degache, and inaccessible by ground vehicles, camera and sound equipment was carried from the base camp to the location in the gorge by donkey train. Some twenty animals were used while cast and crew climbed to the site on foot, a 25 minute hike.

Reaching the Chott el Jerid for the base camp scenes was not much easier. The road from Tozeur came to an abrupt end miles before the location site. So that the production's army of transport vehicles and equipment trucks could negotiate their way across the desert to the base camp location, line producer Alessandro von Normann supervised the extension of the road while also widening the sandy camel/donkey path. The road extension was named the Saul Zaentz Imperial Highway in honor of the producer.

"In the end we all felt that Tunisia was the perfect place for us to shoot Cairo and the desert," Stuart Craig says. "The dazzling desert vistas in the Chott that seem like nothing more than an endless, limitless horizon gave a feeling of eternal space and timelessness. Shooting on that location we were able to get the stunning visuals without any special effects and being in the Chott was a way of opening up the desert even more than we imagined."