By the time Krzysztof Kieślowski made the Decalogue, he was a wellknown film director in Poland, having begun his career making documentaries that focused upon the injustices and absurdities of life under Socialism. He made his first feature film, The Scar, in 1976, and had made five feature films before he began the Decalogue project. The series marked a shift away from the political concerns that had been visible in his earlier films. Kieślowski has stated that during the imposition of martial law in Poland (1981–3) he realised that politics cannot answer ‘any of our essential, fundamental, human and humanistic questions’. The Decalogue was planned by Kieślowski and his co-scriptwriter, lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz, who is often credited with the idea of creating a film series based on the Ten Commandments. Originally, Kieślowski intended to supervise the project while allowing each episode to be directed by a different director. However, he found himself becoming too attached to the project to give it away.

The series was filmed over eleven months in 1987 and 1988 in a single apartment building complex in Warsaw, a grey residential high-rise block typical of Socialist architecture in Eastern Europe. Each was filmed by a different cinematographer, except Decalogue 3 and 9, which were both filmed by Edward Sobociński. Although it was intended as a television series, the Decalogue premiered in a Warsaw cinema between 20 and 24 October 1989, and appeared at international film festivals (Berlin, San Sebastian, Venice) before that.