According to Robert Stack, Samuel Fuller told an actor to go down really low when he passed a 50-gallon drum. Without informing the actor, the director had a sharpshooter on a parallel who shot over the man's head and into the drum. After it blew up, the actor said, "Jesus Christ! Those were real bullets!" Fuller laconically replied, "Don't worry. He knew what he was doing."
Sessue Hayakawa's dialogue was looped by the US-born actor Richard Loo, presumably because Hayakawa's accent was too thick. In 1955, before Hayakawa appeared in Il ponte sul fiume Kwai (1957), this went unnoticed, but nowadays, Loo's higher, recognizable voice combined with the knowledge of what Hayakawa's actual voice sounds like, makes the dub quite obvious.
Despite being pegged for Technicolor and CinemaScope, the project had the relatively low budget of $1.38 million. Fuller planned to get the most bang for his buck by shooting without permits, using hidden cameras to capture the flavor of urban life in Japan during the postwar reconstruction.
The movie is a remake of La strada senza nome (1948). Screenwriter Harry Kleiner worked with director Samuel Fuller to adapt a new version of his screenplay from the original movie. Joseph MacDonald served as director of photography on both films.
When Tom Cruise visits Peter Stormare's rundown apartment in Minority Report (2002), La casa di bambù (1955) is being projected onto the wall.