Akira Kurosawa had trouble getting financing from studios in Japan, blaming much on the political nature of his criticism of nuclear power in the film. He sent a copy of his script to Steven Spielberg, who liked it, and helped get a deal for the film through Warner Bros.
The house in the "Sunshine Through the Rain" sequence is a reproduction of Akira Kurosawa's childhood home in Koshikawa, complete with a nameplate that reads KUROSAWA.
Akira Kurosawa had envisioned the role of Vincent van Gogh being portrayed by Martin Scorsese when he first wrote it, based on his first meeting with him seven years earlier.
"Dreams" was the first film Akira Kurosawa had written by himself without a collaborator since The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945) (Tora no o wo fumu otoko-tachi) 45 years earlier.
In an interview at the BFI in London in February 2017, Martin Scorsese told interviewer Nick James that Akira Kurosawa asked him to appear as Vincent van Gogh in "Dreams" because Francis Ford Coppola had told Kurosawa that Scorsese would do it.
Akira Kurosawa: [weather] The types of weather in each segment set the mood or have a symbolic meaning, be it the rain/rainbow in "Sunshine Through the Rain" and its traditional folklore-based meaning, the snowy tempest in "The Blizzard" representing difficult times in life when one needs to persevere to achieve his goal, the gusts of wind in "Mount Fuji in Red" setting the tone of chaos and turbulence of the segment, and finally the contrast between the heavy clouds of "The Weeping Demon" and the serene sunny weather in "Village of the Watermills."