Production notes

Dreams is a series of eight vignettes based on director Akira Kurosawa's own dreams over the years. According to Teruyo Nogami, the film's production manager and Kurosawa's longtime collaborator, Kurosawa is the protagonist of each episode, in "one way or another". Written over the span of two months, it is the first produced screenplay that the director authored himself since 1945's The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail. Assistant director Takashi Koizumi said that work on the screenplay for Dreams began in June or July 1986 in Gotemba, Shizuoka. Kurosawa would write from 9 a.m. to around 4 p.m. At Kurosawa's directive, Koizumi wrote a short piece titled "To Fly", but Koizumi said Kurosawa would completely rewrite everything and make it his own, except for stuff he was bad at; math for example, would be left as is. Koizumi suggested Kurosawa was influenced by Natsume Sōseki's Ten Nights of Dreams, a book the director liked and in which each story begins with "I had the following dream". He also gave the director Kunio Yanagita's The Legends of Tono and C.G. Jung's writings on dreams, which might have also been of use. Koizumi stated that he believes the sequences in the film incorporate more from Kurosawa's actual memories, than they do his dreams. He specifically mentioned "Sunshine Through the Rain" and how the little boy thinks he has to commit harakiri, and how Kurosawa's sister Momoyo was given a posthumous Buddhist name that uses the characters for "peach orchard" is reflected in "The Peach Orchard". Despite coming off of the award-winning Dersu Uzala (1975) and Kagemusha (1980) and the critically acclaimed Ran (1985), Kurosawa had trouble financing the film. Rejected by his usual studio Toho, Bilge Ebiri wrote that many in the Japanese film industry knew Kurosawa's projects rarely turned a major profit, but also wrote the director knew that the studio heads were concerned about the film's "attack on the country's nuclear power program." American director Steven Spielberg, a fan of Kurosawa, helped get the director a deal with Warner Bros., while George Lucas, who previously helped Kurosawa finance Kagemusha, had his company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) provide the special effects for Dreams at cost. The film is co-produced by Kurosawa's son, Hisao, and his nephew, Yasuo "Mike" Inoue. Ishirō Honda served as a creative consultant for the film. There is a misconception that Honda co-wrote or directed "The Tunnel". In actuality, Kurosawa had him instruct the actors in the segment on how to march and hold their guns due to his experience in the military. Costume designer Emi Wada was aided by Kurosawa's daughter, Kazuko.

Filming took place between January and August 1989, as Kurosawa wanted to incorporate as many of the four seasons as possible. Koizumi said Kurosawa liked to rehearse as soon as he arrived on set at 9 a.m. He also said the director preferred to shoot single takes if possible. "The Tunnel" has a 16-minute shot, which Kurosawa said must have been a world record considering a single film magazine only lasts 10 minutes, that ended only because lights placed on the backs of the soldiers would have been seen when the platoon does an about-face. Koizumi believes Kurosawa did not need many takes because he would edit the film in his head while shooting it. For the "Sunshine Through the Rain" segment, the film's art director Yoshiro Muraki built a replica of Kurosawa's childhood home; the nameplate on the gate even reads "Kurosawa". During production, Kurosawa showed Mitsuko Baisho, the actress playing the mother, a photo of his own mother, and gave her tips on how to act as her. Nogami and the assistant director had initially thought that masks would work for the fox faces, but they did not at all so they had to use makeup, and Nogami called the makeup the hardest part. Kurosawa personally choreographed the foxes' movements. While the rainbow in the segment's final scene was added by ILM, every one of the artificial flowers was actually planted by the crew. Similarly, the peach petals in "The Peach Orchard" were scattered by hand and are not CGI. "The Blizzard" follows mountaineers who struggle up a mountain. Kurosawa previously confessed to being "a devotee of mountain climbing". Mieko Harada, who plays the snow woman in the sequence, also appears as an extra in "The Village of the Water Mills" with her infant child on her back. In "Crows", Vincent van Gogh is portrayed by American filmmaker Martin Scorsese. When discussing who could play the Dutch painter with Francis Ford Coppola, Kurosawa said Scorsese was the only person who came to mind and asked him via a letter. In their brief prior meeting, Scorsese had expressed ideas to the Japanese director about "saving cinema", and Kurosawa said that is how he viewed Van Gogh. Scorsese later said he could not say no because it was Kurosawa, and took a break from making Goodfellas (1990) in order to be in Dreams. Scorsese's scenes were shot in a single day, and Nogami said he was extremely nervous because of how many lines he had. Scorsese himself described how he was given many meticulous instructions, and memorized them all despite his acting skills. Kurosawa was a fan of Van Gogh, both he and his wife liked The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, and he personally "touched up" many of the reproductions of his works seen in the exhibition scene. A year before filming, the crew had replanted a barley field with wheat in order to match Wheatfield with Crows. About 100 crows captured by locals in Hokkaido were kept in cages hidden in the field on either side of the frame and were released on a cue from Scorsese. According to Koizumi, music the birds are known to dislike was played in order to get them to fly within frame. A few crows were also added digitally. In a reference to the 1923 French film La Roue, the segment features Prelude No. 15 in D-flat major ("Raindrop") by Frédéric Chopin. "Crows" is the only segment in the film wherein the characters do not speak Japanese, but instead English and French. "The Village of the Water Mills" segment was filmed at the Daio Wasabi farm in Nagano Prefecture. The colorful costumes worn by the villagers during a funeral procession are based on unusual clothes that Kurosawa saw in a remote northern village in his childhood. The idea of the stone in this segment, on which passersby lay flowers, was possibly inspired by a similar stone from Kurosawa's father's home village in Akita Prefecture:

Near the main thoroughfare of the village stood a huge rock, and there were always cut flowers on top of it. All the children who passed by it picked wild flowers and laid them atop the stone. When I wondered why they did this and asked, the children said they didn't know. I found out later by asking one of the old men in the village. In the Battle of Boshin, a hundred years ago, someone died at that spot. Feeling sorry for him, the villagers buried him, put the stone over the grave and laid flowers on it. The flowers became a custom of the village, which the children maintained without ever knowing why. Nogami said Chishu Ryu struggled to memorize his 8+1⁄2 minutes of dialogue. She explained that although it was later edited into separate pieces, the dialogue was shot in a single take. The segment, and the film as a whole, ends with the director's stand-in walking out of the frame as "In the Village" from the Caucasian Sketches by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov plays.

Dreams was initially composed of 11 sequences, but was trimmed down to nine before filming began. Nearly three months into shooting, the ninth sequence was also abandoned. Nogami said this was due to the ninth segment and its on-location shooting in the United States being estimated to cost $3 million of the film's $14 million budget. Titled "A Wonderful Dream", the cancelled final sequence featured "I" having breakfast in a foreign hotel when he hears a loud commotion and turns on the television to see announcers from various countries reveal that humanity has staved off nuclear extinction with a global peace treaty having been signed. He looks out a window to see crowds of people throwing guns and other weapons into a pile while shouting for joy. In a move similar to the fourth wall-breaking scene of Kurosawa's One Wonderful Sunday (1947), the film was set to end with the viewing audience being called upon to join in with the applause. Coppola even gave Kurosawa some advice on how to save money for the long shots of crowds by cutting cork into human shapes and placing them in flowing water to simulate jostling and shoving. Nogami said Kurosawa found the idea interesting, but never actually tested it. With the scrapping of "A Wonderful Dream", "The Village of the Water Mills" segment was moved from sixth place, to the film's last. In an interview with Nobuhiko Obayashi, Kurosawa described another sequence he really wanted to make that featured the asura at Kōfuku-ji coming to life and juggling the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kiyomizu-dera and others while its three faces argue with each other, before deciding to watch the moon rise at Mount Wakakusa. But the director said the "issues of the Kyoto temples aren't global problems." Jim Bailey of the Los Angeles Times reported that another sequence was scrapped due to how much it would cost to use special effects to make people appear to be flying.