Calista Flockhart and Anna Friel's mud fight had to be filmed twice. It took four hours to prep and clean the actresses for a second take.
This is Michelle Pfeiffer's first attempt at Shakespeare since her debut as an actress in a New York stage production of Twelfth Night.
Although it appears to be an idyllic location, the shoot was anything but. Five weeks of filming almost completely at night quickly took its toll on an increasingly unhinged cast and crew, whilst all the lush greenery ultimately became poisonous (the studio set was in an aircraft-sized hangar where the plants all started decaying, releasing all sorts of noxious gases into the atmosphere) under the hot studio lights.
Bottom's wife does not appear in the play. She was added to this production to show an unhappy life and make his character more sympathetic.
Some of the orchestral score is from Felix Mendelssohn's 1843 incidental music for this William Shakespeare play. It has also been used in Frederick Ashton's 1964 ballet adaptation of the play, "The Dream", and in George Balanchine's ballet version of the play. The 1935 film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) also used generous chunks of Mendelssohn's music.