To make the actors look like the people they're playing, some sacrifices had to be made:
- actress Elsa Zylberstein took on 18 pounds for the role, and spent weeks trying to imitate Simone Veil's speech pattern;
- actress Rebecca Marder listened to Veil's speeches two hours a day during 5-6 months and watched a lot of archive footage, and had a lot of makeup and prosthetics on her nose, cheeks and eyebrow arches;
- actor Olivier Gourmet had to endure five hours of makeup every morning before shooting.
Actress Elsa Zylberstein had wanted to make a movie about Simone Veil for a decade, until she met producers Vivien Aslanian and Romain Le Grand. She suggested Olivier Dahan's name for directing the movie, which sounded unlikely, as he had wanted to stop making movies. But she called him, met him, and three hours later he was in. He then began to write the script, which took a year.
Shooting took place in Septmeber-December 2019, and the movie was originally scheduled for release in March 2021. However, because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the general release schedule, its release got postponed to October 2021, then to February 2022 and then finally to October 2022, three years after filming began.
The Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen scenes were all shot in Hungary.