The ideas for the film came from Akira Kurosawa's nephew, Mike Y. Inoue, who wanted to be a scriptwriter and was giving his scripts to his uncle. Kurosawa liked it and made suggestions, to which Inoue spent six months rewriting the script under the title "Bad Men's Prosperity." Kurosawa, along with several others, reworked it even more into the final version, though Inoue did not receive screen credit.
Kyôko Kagawa wore both uneven shoes and a knee brace to help make her character's limp more believable and real.
The wedding reception scene was filmed over two weeks.
In a 1996 interview, Masaru Sato stated that his musical score for the film was his own interpretation of a 'big, evil corporate world' through the phrase he had always heard relating to the corporate world; "It's a jungle out there," which inspired him to "create a jungle-like atmosphere in the music" for the film.
American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola has listed The Bad Sleep Well (1960) as one of his favorite films, citing the first thirty minutes of the film "as perfect as any film I've ever seen" and used it as inspiration for the wedding sequence in the Oscar-winning gangster drama The Godfather (1972).
Akira Kurosawa: [weather] Wada's colleague accountant's suicide occurs during a rainy day; rain and wind are shown while Nishi and Itakura interrogate Moriyama.