Tim Shadbolt, the Mayor of Invercargill, New Zealand, was involved in a serious motor accident while pitching Southland, NZ, as a shooting location for this movie.
D'Leh is spelled "Held" backwards, "Held" being the German word for "hero". Roland Emmerich chose this name as an easteregg.
The most difficult challenge for the visual effects department was creating a computer generated wet saber-tooth tiger since it required several of the most challenging elements of visual effects to be combined; fur, wet fur, water and creature animation. The tiger was created by the Double Negative visual effects company.
Release prints were delivered to some theaters under the false title -- "King Dinosurs" (that is the actual spelling).
Not screened for critics -- only a 20 min excerpt was shown to journalists.
This film features some of the alleged controversies in history -- the construction of the great pyramids 12,000 years ago, almost 7,500 years earlier, the existence of the Ben-Ben stone (the pyramidion stone that is now missing from the top of the Khafre pyramid), the correlation between the position of the pyramids and the stars from the Orion constellation (associated by the Egyptians with the god Osiris), the Sphinx with a head of a lion allegedly correlated with the Leo constellation rising to the east (at the same time when Orion is in conjunction with the Giza pyramid complex) and the possible nonhuman origin of the first kings of Egypt.
Reference is also made to the Platonic theory that the construction techniques used in Egypt were imported from the ancient lost civilization of Atlantis. The movie makers include a glimpse of a map showing one of the putative locations of Atlantis, off the coast of Spain.
The star constellation called the 'sign of the warrior' is actually the constellation Orion, which also played a key role in deciphering ancient signs in _Stargate (1995)_, also directed by Roland Emmerich.