After her plane is forced down in the Ténéré she meets Lieutenant Antoine Chauvet (Canet) of the French Camel Corps who joins in the hunt for Lancaster.

Karim Dridi decided to develop the film after reading French journalist Sylvain Estibal's novel Le dernier vol de Lancaster.

Dridi had travelled through the Sahara and was interested in making The Last Flight because he felt the novel could be made into a film that deviated from the normal conventions of the romantic epic.

[1] After he narrated the story to Marion Cotillard, she agreed to play Marie, a character loosely based on Lancaster's real-life lover, Chubbie Miller.

While critics praised Antoine Monod's cinematography, they criticised the story for a perceived lack of originality, comparing it to The English Patient and The Sheltering Sky.