Due to the portrayal of youth and sex, the film was prohibited to persons under 18 in France - "the very audience it was meant for," griped Jean-Luc Godard.
The film was made without a shooting script: the writing instead consisted of a summary of the film's main sequences, with the dialogue itself being created the night before filming each scene, or in some cases improvised during filming itself.
While filming the cinema scene, the actors had to react to a blank screen, as if they were really watching a movie. Chantal Goya (Madeleine) asked Jean-Luc Godard what film they were meant to be watching, and he remarked Gone with the Wind (1939). As such, Goya played it as if she were watching an epic, romantic movie. Only after the fact did Goya learn that the film her character was watching was, in fact, a pseudo-pornographic art house movie.
The film within a film sequence which parodies the work of Ingmar Bergman was shot at the Scandic Hotel Continental, Stockholm. Ingmar Bergman, not being a fan of Jean-Luc Godard found out about the film, went to go and see it and called it "a classic case of Godard: mind-numbingly boring."
The film uses natural-light settings and minimal production crew for the entire movie.