François Civil and Karim Leklou had previously co-starred with director Gilles Lellouche in The Stronghold (2020), in which they all played police officers who worked together. In this film, Leklou and Civil play father and son.
The May 2024 issue of Vanity Fair France featured 17-year-old actors Malik Frikah and Mallory Wanecque in a sexually charged photoshoot in bed with François Civil and Adèle Exarchopoulos (who are both in their 30s) to promote this film. One of the photos features Civil holding Wanecque's feet. Behind-the-scenes images shared by the photoshoot's stylist showed both teen actors with their heads lying on Civil's lap in bed.
Loosely based on the 1997 best-selling Irish novel "Jackie Loves Johnser OK?" by Neville Thompson, whose French title is "L'Amour Ouf" (literally "Phew Love", and a pun with the expression "L'Amour Fou", literally "Crazy Love"), which is also this film's original title. This film is mostly based on West Side Story (1961) and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet (1996).
Director Gilles Lellouche said in several interviews between 2023 and 2024 that this film would have at least 3 hours of runtime. However, in the beginning of May 2024, the website of the Cannes Film Festival listed the film's runtime as 2 hours and 46 minutes, making it the second-longest film in official competition at Cannes 2024, behind The Seed of the Sacred Fig (2024).
Several of this film's actors (and also the director) often co-star together in at least one film per year nearly every year since 2020. Some of them have appeared together in two films and/or TV series released in the same year.