Christophe Honoré decided to make this adaptation of La Princesse de Clèves after French president Nicholas Sarkozy criticized the novel.
When writing the script Christophe Honoré consulted 'Louis Garrel' as to what subject his character should teach. Garrel suggested he be a teacher of Italian and Honoré wrote it into the script assuming that Garrel knew Italian because his fiancé at the time, actress Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, was Italian. During shooting he discovered that Garrel actually spoke very little of the language.
In the scene in which Junie enters a café and smiles briefly at a woman, the woman she is smiling at is Chiara Mastroianni. Mastroianni played Catherine de Clèves in La lettre (1999), another adaptation of La Princesse de Clèves which La belle personne (2008) was based on.