Anecdotes

François Ozon turned down the opportunity to direct the movie.

The movie is full of actors that later played other French presidents:

Dominique de Villepin actor Samuel Labarthe portrayed a younger Jacques Chirac (played here by Bernard Le Coq) that very same year in Mort d'un président (2011). He would later go on to play a third real life French politician, Charles de Gaulle, in De Gaulle, l'éclat et le secret (2020).

Hippolyte Girardot would later play president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing in La rupture (2013).

As for Laurent Claret (Général Rondot), he'll be later asked to play president François Mitterrand twice: in Le pouvoir ne se partage pas (2013) and Le chapeau de Mitterrand (2016).

Initially slated to release on May 11th 2011, the film was pushed back a week to coincide with its Cannes Film Festival premiere.

Bernard Le Coq and Michel Bompoil both reprised their roles as Jacques Chirac and Henri Guaino a couple of years later in La dernière campagne (2013), a television film centered on the 2012 French Presidential Election, but through a fictional narrative.

François Cluzet was originally slated to play Nicolas Sarkozy and Lambert Wilson to play Dominique de Villepin, but they both backed out.