Claude Chabrol was famous for his drunken antics on movie sets. Stéphane Audran remembers that, one day during the shooting of Le boucher (1970), he drank so much wine that he had to be brought away with a cart.
While his wife Stéphane Audran often stated to owe everything to him, some critics have tried to claim that it was the other way around, with Claude Chabrol's cinema benefiting a lot from the director's encounter with the actress. Chabrol himself wasn't too fond of this take on his long partnership with Audran, stating that Stéphane had been a pivotal figure in the making of Le boucher (1970) by suggesting him to pair her with Jean Yanne for a film, but this was as far as her influence on his work went.
Filmed at Tremolat, Perigord, in October 1969.