Initially Lai was going to turn down the Love Story assignment,

 

but the French actor Alain Delon had seen an early screening of the film and persuaded him to postpone his summer holiday and work on the score instead. Delon and the producer Robert Evans took a copy of the film to Paris, and it moved the composer so much that, as he recalled, “I went straight home, sat at my keyboard and wrote the theme that very night.”