During a recent showing on TCM, it was stated that Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier did not get along on this film. He called her a "prude" and she called him "a bottom pincher". Their relationship had been deteriorating for some time, and this was the last film they appeared in together.
This was the only film teaming Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald in which they never sang together. Aware that her classical style was poorly matched to his popular vocalizing, Ernst Lubitsch even inserted a joke about the musical mismatch. At one point Chevalier seemed to be serenading MacDonald with a cultured baritone voice, only for Lubitsch to reveal the voice belonged to one of his orderlies. The joke is that orderly turns out to be famously squeaky-voiced SterlingHolloway.
Maurice Chevalier avoided any confrontations with Jeanette MacDonald and Ernst Lubitsch throughout production. He did, however, blow up at his assistant, Robert Spencer who had relayed the director and co-star's invitation to Chevalier to help them plan the wrap party and provide gifts for the crew. The actor handed the assignment to Spencer, but when Spencer presented him with the bill for the gifts, which came to about $1,000, the notoriously stingy actor screamed at him. After thinking about it, and realizing that the cost of the gifts was not out of line with then-current Hollywood custom, Chevalier apologized.
The 1,000 gas chandeliers on the sets took two hours to turn on.
Censors from the film industry's Production Code Administration objected to a scene at Maxim's in which Danilo carries Sonia to a couch, drops her there and then sits beside her. They only passed the scene when the stars managed to contort their bodies so she could keep both feet on the floor. That taken care of, PCA head Joseph Breen passed the film.