When director Maïwenn approached Johnny Depp for the role of King Louis XV, Depp asked her if she was sure about casting an American for a French king. Maiwenn assured him she was sure. Depp is an American actor born in Owensboro, Kentucky. For their first meeting, Depp and Maiwenn conversed entirely in French which went on for hours.
It was partly shot in the Château de Versailles (i.e. the actual setting of the story), but the constraints were quite limiting: the filmmakers could only shoot on Mondays (where the castle is closed to the public), and only outside, in the Royal Chapel, in the Hall of Mirrors and the Hercules Salon, and no candles could be used as it could damage the location. As a result, several rooms were built as movie sets in a studio, as it was way easier to light and shoot scenes that way, without the time constraints.
Maïwenn's long awaited dream project inspired by when she watched the 2006 film Marie Antoinette (2006). She found the story of Jeanne du Barry 'fascinating', and read her biography. Every time she finished a movie, she dove right back in this book, but never felt like she had the right to make a movie about her. It's only after making My King (2015) that she felt she could finally take this on.
Maïwenn admitted she belatedly discovered Barry Lyndon (1975), which had a huge effect on her. This convinced her to make her movie the old way and not make it more modern like Marie Antoinette (2006). As a result, she shot the whole film in 35mm and used Barry Lyndon (1975) as a template for how the movie should look. This was quite challenging to her, as she was used to make very spur-of-the-moment movies, where improvisation is more than allowed and the blocking is made up on the spot; for Jeanne du Barry (2023), everything had to be worked out in advance.