Anecdotes

Based on an incident from Louis Malle's own youth. Julien is modeled after Malle.

In an interview, Louis Malle stated that he thought Francine Racette (a French-Canadian actress) would be the best to play the mother, but she replied that she wasn't making movies any more. Louis Malle, who was a good friend of her, insisted: "you just can't refuse to play my mother after all". And of course, Francine accepted.

In the restaurant scene, Mme. Quentin protests she is not bigoted against Jews, adding, "Apart from that Léon Blum, they can hang him." Léon Blum was Prime Minister of the French Republic 1936-1937. A Jew (and a moderate socialist who introduced paid vacations and the forty-hour working week), Blum was interned at Buchenwald and subjected to a show trial by the Nazis, so the possibility of his execution was real at the time the movie is set. In the event, he conducted his own defense so skillfully that an embarrassed Hitler had to order his trial adjourned, and he lived until 1950.

Before he was a director, Quentin Tarantino worked in a video store. He called this movie "the reservoir film" because he couldn't pronounce the title. When recommending the film to a customer, they got angry at Tarantino for trying to recommend a film they had no interest in, saying "I don't want to see no Reservoir Dogs!" and promptly left the store. Reservoir Dogs would later be the title of Tarantino's directorial debut.

Selected by the Vatican in the "values" category of its list of 45 "great films."