Claude Chabrol has excellent new-wave credentials and is in some ways a representative figure for this innovative movement in French cinema. For the small budget of 32 million old francs, he was able to shoot Le Beau Serge over nine weeks in the winter of 1957/8 and to film it in what was essentially his home village. To make his first film, Chabrol returned to the scene of his wartime childhood, the village of Sardent in central France. The reason for this was mainly financial: he had intended to shoot Les Cousins first, but that story was set in Paris and would have been twice as expensive to film. The reception of Les Cousins was, however, in one way problematic, and was a sign of things to come for Chabrol.