When Joë Hamman returned to filmmaking after World War I, he formed his own production company, the Films Joë Hamman, and as a first production planned a western-themed adventure made in the Camargue region of southern France. He asked his friend, the marquis Folco de Baroncelli-Javon, to write the scenario. Folco lived in the Camargue on his ranch-like estate (le mas de l’Amarée), and had often supplied land, lodging, personnel, horses and his herd of prized Mediterranean bulls to film crews in the pre-war years. Hamman proposed the idea:

The sketch would aptly characterise Hamman's earlier films investigated in the previous chapter: cursory characters and plot provide support for the visual interest of scenery, decor and costumes. The ‘Indians’ stand out as a western motif whose justification alongside the ‘Camargue element’ is not immediately apparent, and the film would again feature Hamman performing his signature stunts. Hamman does not indicate how these diverse elements will come together as a coherent narrative. The pitch suggests more a mixed salad of appealing attractions lightly dressed with a thin plot – a western element here, some Camargue scenery there, spectacular feats and (why not?) a top hat or gown – than an integrated sauce thickened with narrative continuity: in short, a cinema characteristic of the films he made for the Gaumont and Eclipse studios before the war.

Hamman may have hoped to take up filmmaking much as he had left it, but cinema had not stood still in the intervening years. After 1914, Hollywood decisively dominated the global film market and the feature film had become an industry standard, its greater length sustained by causality, character psychology, and spatio-temporal orientation constructed through shot variations and smooth continuity in editing.