In the early 1970s, Claude Sautet met Michel Piccoli. For a whole decade, the director filmed the actor in The Things of Life, Max and the Junkmen, Vincent, François, Paul and the Others, and finally Mado.
Sautet met Piccoli through the composer Philippe Sarde, who composed the music for most of his films. The director was impressed by Piccoli and the tension he exuded in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Doulos, released in 1962. Sautet chose his actors according to what they embodied in life: Michel Piccoli's natural, bourgeois elegance inspired him.
Busy depicting bourgeois sociology, the strength of female characters and the cracks in a masculinity that is losing its identity, Sautet relies on the wardrobe to give life to characters who are all restraint, incapable of expressing their feelings, of revealing themselves completely. Characters who hide under suits and felt hats, behind cigarettes.