To highlight the difference between reality and fiction, the scenes depicting reality were shot in a very documentary-like fashion with handheld cameras, while the fiction scenes were shot with better lighting and with Steadicams.
Before starting the pre-production, Asghar Farhadi wasn't planning on casting the best working actors of French cinema, but as he began to offer parts to actors, everyone said yes, and the casting process was the quickest of his career.
The Parisian street where most of the action happens is the famous boulevard Saint-Martin, near the place de la République. However, six different locations in Paris were used during shooting.
An American production company suggested to Asghar Farhadi that he makes a series based on Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog (1989). He declined the proposition, and also later declined to adapt one of its episodes as a feature length movie, but the idea stayed with him. He had long wanted to make a movie about sound, and realized that one of the episodes of Dekalog (1989) is about sight: Dekalog, szesc (1989), the one where a teenager spies on his neighbors. Farhadi wondered what was the sound on the other side of the story, hence the idea of making them foley artists in the movie. Farhadi and his co-writer Saeed Farhadi (also his brother) then adapted the existing story around these ideas: sound, sight and writing.
