Wissenswertes

Akira Kurosawa had hoped to make this film as early as in the 1950s, but he had trouble adapting the story to a Japanese setting, never thinking that one day he would actually be able to film it on location in Russia, and with Russian actors.

The film is based on the autobiographical writings of Russian soldier Vladimir Arsenev during his surveying expeditions in Siberia in the early 1900s.

Akira Kurosawa, since childhood, had been a devoted fan of Russian literature - a fact, of course, already well-known to Mosfilm when that studio asked him to suggest a literary source for the director to adapt into a film to be shot in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the studio was taken aback when he suggested that he be allowed to film Vladimir Arsenev's book about Dersu Uzala: they were astonished that he had even heard of it, because the book at that time was so little known outside the USSR.

Production lasted 3 years.

This film was made when a member of the Russian embassy contacted Akira Kurosawa, asking him to make a Russian film for Russians, being that television hadn't grown yet in the USSR and that Russia lacked, according to the ambassador, good writers and directors for films.

Akira Kurosawa: [weather] Same as in Kurosawa's other films, this one too continues the tradition of having various weather conditions (rain, snow, rainbow...) for aesthetic or symbolic value.