During the shooting of the scene in which Lino Ventura runs after the freight train that he tries to jump in, director Jean-Pierre Melville asked the train conductor to speed the train up, making it more difficult for Ventura to successfully make the jump, and Melville wanted to see the pain on his face as he tried harder to catch the train. When Ventura heard about this, long after the shooting, he was so angry about it that he had a huge row with Melville. The two never spoke again. They did make another film together, L'armée des ombres (1969), but only spoke to each other through assistants.
Mel Ferrer was hired to play Orloff. On the first days of shooting, he had an argument with director Jean-Pierre Melville and decided to quit. Melville thought that Ferrer was not the right actor for this character anyway, and after Ferrer left he called Pierre Zimmer to replace him.
The scene taking place before the robbery, on the lost road, when the gangsters wait for the armored truck, is highly influenced by a very similar sequence in the film Le coup de l'escalier (1959), in which you also have gangsters - Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan - wait for a bank robbery. The music score is also nearly, if not, the same.
Martin Scorsese, in discussing with Spike Lee the films that influenced The Irishman (2019), says he screened Le doulos (1962) with The Irishman (2019) cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto. "The tone of The Irishman (2019), it had to be contemplative and an epic, but it had to be an intimate epic," he said. "I showed a couple of Jean-Pierre Melville films, Le doulos (1962) and Le deuxième souffle (1966), with Jean-Paul Belmondo, both of those pictures. It's a very different world, but I liked the understatement of it."