The movie is based on Irène Némirovsky's unfinished book "Suite Française" and focuses on the novel "Dolce". The book was only found after Némirovsky's death at a concentration camp in Auschwitz in 1942. Her elder daughter, Denise Epstein, kept the notebook containing the manuscript of Suite Française for fifty years without reading it, believing that it would indeed be a journal or diary too painful to read. In the late 1990s, however, having made arrangements to donate her mother's papers to a French archive, Denise decided to examine the notebook first. At last discovering what it contained, she instead had it published in France, where it became a bestseller in 2004.
Initially, Matthias Schoenaerts didn't want to accept the role of a Nazi officer because he had moral issues with the character, but he changed his mind after he read the book on which this movie was based and thought, "If the writer loves the character so much, then I have to allow myself to love him as well."
Matthias Schoenaerts played the piano when he was a kid, so he had a little basis, but he wanted to learn how to play for real in this movie.