Dreams

Dreams (1990)

夢

The past, present, and future. The thoughts and images of one man... for all men. One man's dreams... for every dreamer.

Eight visually rich vignettes drawn from Kurosawa’s own dreams—fox weddings and vanished orchards, a soldier’s ghosts, a walk through Van Gogh’s canvases, nuclear nightmares, and a water-mill utopia—meditate on childhood, art, mortality, and humanity’s uneasy bond with nature.

Date of release
1990-05-11
TMDB
7.7 / 10 (609)
Runtime
1h 59m
Genres
Fantasy, Drama
Director
Akira Kurosawa

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: ¥1.5B

Dreams , also known as Akira Kurosawa's Dreams, is a 1990 magical realist anthology film of eight vignettes written and directed by Akira Kurosawa. Inspired by actual recurring dreams that Kurosawa had, it stars Akira Terao, Martin Scorsese, Chishū Ryū, Mieko Harada and Mitsuko Baisho. It marked Kurosawa's first film in 45 years of which he was the screenplay's sole author. An international co-production of Japan and the United States, Dreams was made five years after Ran, with assistance from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and funded by Warner Bros. The film was screened out of competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, and has consistently received positive reviews.

Production

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.

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." Amer…

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.

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.

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.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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