Background and Trivia |
- Warner Bros. submitted the film to the US copyright office on October 15th, 1990 with the registration number of PA0000487978. The movie was submitted with its international title, Dreams, its US title, Akira Kurosawa's Dreams.
- Toho's general involvement on the movie is somewhat of an anomaly. Toho actually rejected the screenplay for Dreams when director Akira Kurosawa showed it to them. According to Bilge Ebiri's essay on the movie, Kurosawa mused the sticking point was around the script's negative portrayal of Japan's nuclear power program. Thanks to Steven Spielberg, though, the movie found financing at Warner Bros. studios instead. However, Warner Bros.'s involvement on actually producing the movie was mostly hands off and, as mentioned in the Japanese theatrical pamphlet, Dreams started filming at Toho Studios on January 10th, 1989. The first material filmed was for "The Peach Orchard" segment. Despite being filmed at Toho Studios, though, Toho doesn't appear to have provided any financial backing for the production. As a result, citing Toho as a production company for the movie is not fully accurate despite it being created there and why it has an asterisk above. As a side note, when the movie was originally submitted to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences it listed Toho as a production company, which appeared this way on the wwwdb.oscars.org database before it was revamped to remove all films un-nominated for Oscars.
- Financing for the movie was complicated. While Warner Bros. agreed to pay $12 million, that was on the grounds of receiving a completed film. This means the budget had to be acquired in other ways to actually make the movie before getting the promised money from Warner Bros. for the finished film. This resulted in taking out loans, which took shape of a fixed-rate European loan from a California bank. Noted in the Los Angeles Times.
- George Lucas arranged for his company, Industrial Light & Magic, to create the special effects for Dreams at cost without additional charges. This saved the production considerable money. Mentioned in Bilge Ebiri's essay on the movie.
- As noted, finding financial backing for the project was tricky. Director Akira Kurosawa was quoted that he and his son tried to pitch the project to "four or five" different Japanese companies for financing, but without luck. While Kurosawa didn't want to mention what companies they were, it's overt that Toho was one of them. Of the experience, Kurosawa called the executives at Toho "childish". He also recounts how he ran into employees of Toho after financing was secured elsewhere. They mentioned they heard he was making a new movie, to which he replied "I'm making a film from the script we showed you". This story is presumably before the movie was shot at Toho Studios. Mentioned in the Los Angeles Times.
- The Japanese release of Dreams focused a lot more on Steven Spielberg's involvement, who was an executive producer on the movie. This includes featuring an image of Spielberg during the trailer and also on some versions of the poster. It also includes a title card that says "S. スピルバーグ [Spielberg] presents" before that movie starts, with the same title card also appearing in the trailer. Furthermore, Japanese posters in English also mention the movie as "Steven Spielberg presents Akira Kurosawa's Dreams".
- Although uncredited for it, Ishiro Honda wrote and directed "The Tunnel" segment of the movie. Noted in Age of the Gods (self-published).
- After learning that director Ishiro Honda was involved in the film, actor (and usually a film director) Martin Scorsese requested to meet with him. Brought up in Age of the Gods (self-published).
- The original script featured 11 dreams compared to the 8 dreams that appear in the final product. One of the scrapped dreams was about Buddhist priests protesting a temple tax, which was removed due to concerns it wouldn't resonate with overseas audiences. Another of the scrapped dreams was removed for budget reasons, as much of it would feature humans flying about. Talked about in the Los Angeles Times.
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