Director Nadav Lapid did not take shortcuts to find bilingual French actors to pretend to accent, but translated the script into Hebrew and found people in Israel who could not speak French but were willing to learn. That's how he discovered Tom Mercier, who was still in drama school at the time. Messier's father was Jewish from southwestern France, but his parents were separated when he was very young. He was raised by his mother who grew up in Israel. He spoke almost only Hebrew, but he also longed for French culture.
Rapide didn't even send Messier to a French relative's house to learn French. Instead, he took a two-month course in Israel, and then taught himself by reading French texts and film and television resources. In order to match the psychological state of the characters in the film, Messier locked himself in his room for a few hours every day for a whole year, watched the cultural channel ARTE, listened to France Culture and France Inter radio, and even watched French films from Cocteau to New Wave. over and over
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