Trivia
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-Boris is in his cottage writing poetry. He reads, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas." He then promptly balls up the writing and throws it into the fire, calling it "too sentimental". The line is from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of 'J.Alfred Prufrock'".
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-The shots of the lion statues edited into the love scene between Boris and the Countess, and the shot of the soldier being shot in the eye through his glasses are parodies of similar statues in Le cuirassé Potemkine (1925), shown during the Odessa Steps massacre scene.
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-Filmed mainly in Hungary, with some scenes done in Paris. It wouldn't be until 1996 and Tout le monde dit    I love you (1996) that Woody Allen would make another film outside of the New York area.
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-The movie is considered a spoof of the Russian Novel, particularly the works of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, particularly "The Idiot", "The Gambler", "War and Peace", "Anna Karenina", "Crime and Punishment", and "The Brothers Karamazov".
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-Woody Allen was working on a script about two New Yorkers who try to solve a murder when he got stuck. When blocked, Allen noticed a book on Russian History at his home. As the deadline was fast approaching for delivery of a contracted screenplay, Allen got inspired and decided to spoof the genre of Russian novel and history for this movie instead, putting the other script on the back-burner. As such, the other script was not finished until later, but it eventually became Meurtre mystérieux à Manhattan (1993).
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-This Woody Allen movie featured the Death character of The Grim Reaper. Allen is known to be inspired and influenced by Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman who had featured the Grim Reaper in his film Le septième sceau (1957). In the Bergman film the Grim Reaper wears black robes whereas in this film he wears a white gown. Allen would later feature the Grim Reaper again in Harry dans tous ses états (1997).
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-The wheat scene with towards the end of the film is a direct visual parody of Ingmar Bergman's classic Persona (1966). The juxtaposition of faces is an homage to Bergman's trademark shots.
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-The philosophical "babble" between the characters (e.g. "subjectivity is objective") actually comes from the writing of Russian philosophers G.I. Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky, as does the title "Love and Death".
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-Woody Allen was so concerned about the quality of Budapest's food that he consumed only canned food and bottled water that he had brought with him from America. As a result, Allen was one of the few of his movie's cast and crew who did not suffer dysentery while filming.
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-In an interview with 'Esquire' magazine, Woody Allen once said of the making of this movie: "When good weather was needed, it rained. When rain was needed, it was sunny. The cameraman was Belgian, his crew French. The underlings were Hungarian, the extras were Russian. I speak only English - and not really that well. Each shot was chaos. By the time my directions were translated, what should have been a battle scene ended up as a dance marathon. In scenes where Keaton and I were supposed to stroll as lovers, Budapest suffered its worst weather in twenty-five years".
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-After Guerre et amour (1975), Woody Allen would again utilize the three word title with an "and" middle word on several more occasions. These would be for Maris et femmes (1992), Ombres et brouillard (1991), Accords & désaccords (1999), Melinda et Melinda (2004) and Crimes et délits (1989). Guerre et amour (1975) was Allen's first film in which he used this type of three word title. Similar also was Allen's title for Hannah et ses soeurs (1986).
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-When Woody Allen leaves for the army, he is shown carrying preserved butterflies and a butterfly net as homage to Russian-born author Vladimir Nabokov.
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-When Boris' father visits him in his prison cell, near the end of the movie, he tells him about Raskolnikov killing two women and about getting told by the brothers Karamazov. Rodion Raskolnikov is the protagonist in Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic "Crime and Punishment", in which he murders two women and does not know how to deal with the moral consequences afterwards. "The Brothers Karamazov" is another epic book by the same Russian writer. The dialogue also evokes "The Possessed", "Raw Youth", "The Idiot", "The Insulted and Injured" (usually "The Insulted and Humiliated"), "The Gambler", "The Double", "Bobok", all of them novels by Dostoyevsky.
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-The film began development at Fox and was intended to be their one of their big Christmas 1974 releases. Eventually, it went into turnaround to United Artists due to their relationship with Allen. Allen wouldn't make a film for Fox until Melinda et Melinda (2004).
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-The film's Guerre et amour (1975) title is a play on words of such Russian novel titles as Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment". Woody Allen would around fourteen years later make a movie called Crimes et délits (1989).
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-Woody Allen has said that this movie was "my funniest picture to that time".
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-Woody Allen once said: "I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia".
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-The name of Woody Allen's Boris Grushenko character is the same as Alan Cumming's character in the later James Bond movie Goldeneye
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-The movie's big battle sequence features Sergei Prokofiev's cantata music from Sergei M. Eisenstein's epic Alexandre Nevski (1938).
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-Debut Woody Allen film since cast by longtime friend and New York casting director Juliet Taylor who has performed casting duties on every Allen film [to date, June 2013] right up to Blue Jasmine (2013).
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-The soundtrack was originally scored with the music of Igor Stravinsky, but Woody Allen thought it made the scenes "unfunny". He discovered Sergei Prokofiev's lighthearted music worked far better.
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-Woody Allen's sixth film as director.
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-The film negative for the big banquet scenes got damaged and the whole sequence had to be re-shot.
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-Actress Diane Keaton at one point got poked in the eye from a violin bow and suffered minor injuries.
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-Producer Charles H. Joffe got food poisoning during the production shoot and became inactive.
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-One of the movie's male actors suffered a serious accident during principal photography breaking both his legs in an unfortunate car accident.
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-One of eight cinema movie collaborations of Woody Allen and actress Diane Keaton, Allen co-starring in six of them and directing seven of them.
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-Woody Allen on the shoot hurt his back after tripping on some ice in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
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-According to show-business trade paper'Variety', the movie featured "about fifty-four supporting players"
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-This film's comic style paid homage to a number of classic comedians which included Bob Hope, Charles Chaplin and The Marx Brothers.
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-According to film critic Leonard Maltin, the film is "like a remake of Bob Hope's Le joyeux barbier (1946)".
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After filming Guerre et amour (1975), the shoot was so difficult filming in Paris and Hungary, Woody Allen vowed never to shoot there again. Interestingly, considering this, Ombres et brouillard (1991) is set in Eastern / Central Europe and was not shot there, but on huge sound stages at New York's Astoria Studios.However, Allen in later years has shot in Europe and England. Tout le monde dit I love you (1996) was the first Woody Allen directed film since Guerre et amour (1975) to be shot outside of New York.