Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

• Incorrectly regarded as goofs: When Grenouille meets the perfumer, at his house/laboratory, he knows where all the substances are, although he has never been there before. He is able to do this due to his heightened sense of smell, he is able to work out where specific substances are by the scent they give off.
  
  
• Factual errors: Midway through the movie a whore appears with a Pekingese dog. The Pekingese were not formally introduced into Europe until midway through the 19th Century when Britain and France "sacked" the Chinese Empire (circa 1860). The Pekingese were kept exclusively in the Chinese Imperial Palace (Forbidden City) until then and maintained by eunuchs. The movie takes place in the mid 18th Century. While it may be possible British or French royalty could have had a Pekingese (although extremely unlikely), a French harlot owning a Pekingese in the 1700's is an impossibility.

• Ridley Scott was attached to the project years before production finally began. Tim Burton was also considered as director.
  
  
• Other directors interested in making this film were Martin Scorsese, Milos Forman and Stanley Kubrick.
  
  
• Bernd Eichinger wanted to make this movie for years, but Patrick Süskind refused to sell the movie rights. Süskind finally relented and received approximately 10 million euros in 2001.
  
  

• Author Patrick Süskind is known to be very skeptical and for a long time did not want to sell the movie rights to his novel. His experience with producer Bernd Eichinger and others who desperately wanted to turn "Das Parfum" into a movie was shown in the satire Rossini (1997), for which he wrote the screenplay himself. His character is the strange author Jakob Windisch, Producer Bernd Eichinger is portrayed in the character Oskar Reiter. In Rossini, the book everybody was fighting over was changed into a novel about the Loreley-legend. Other characters in this movie are caricatures of the Munich media business.
  
  
• Héloïse Adam auditioned for the part of Madame Arnulfi.
  
  
• As of 2006, the most expensive German movie ever made.
  
  
• The actual liquid of the "ultimate" perfume at the end is a mixture of coke thinned with a bit of water.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick claimed the book was unfilmable.
  
  
• The book was the source of inspiration for the Nirvana song "Scentless Apprentice." Kurt Cobain claimed to carry the book in his pocket and said he identified with Grenouille's alienation.
  
  
• Most of the costumes were manufactured in Romania.
  
  
• The production team scouted eight different countries in Europe looking of the best place to represent eighteenth century Paris before settling on Barcelona, Spain.
  
  
• Julian Schnabel, after making Before Night Falls (2000), was another director who tried to mount a production of this story but the project never got off the ground.