Eartha Kitt was offered the role of Carmen, but the studio wanted her singing voice to be dubbed, so that her character would have an operatic voice. The same offer was made to Harry Belafonte and Diahann Carroll who accepted, but Kitt refused, wanting to use her natural voice. Dubbing was not required for Pearl Bailey, whose own voice suited her comedic songs.
This film contains just 169 shots in 103 minutes of action. This equates to an average shot length of about 36 seconds, which is very high, given the 8 - 10 seconds standard of most Hollywood films made during the 1950s.
In France, theaters were not allowed to show this movie for more than 25 years because the heirs of the French librettists of the original opera "Carmen", sued Twentieth Century Fox for using different lyrics with Bizet's music.
Leontyne Price was originally assigned to dub Dorothy Dandridge's singing voice, but fell ill and was replaced by Marilyn Horne (as Marilynn Horne).
Although the original Broadway production had used a standard pit orchestra with Georges Bizet's orchestrations for the opera "Carmen" slightly altered by orchestrator Robert Russell Bennett, the film score was created by Herschel Burke Gilbert, the Music Director (a term he always insisted was the correct one, not "Musical Director), using a full symphony orchestra (ranging from about 90 to over 105 pieces), which enabled him to present the music with the sensibility of most of Bizet's original 1875 orchestrations as they were meant to be heard, although modified to fit the story line and transitions of the film. Because of Marilyn Horne's coming into the singing cast quite late in the production, and because of a number of unrelated delays, Gilbert had to leave the production shortly before it was completed, as he had a commitment for an original score of another film. Dimitri Tiomkin, a Fox Studio senior, as it were, stepped in to put together the last bits of recording and supervising the last music editing. Technically, especially given his seniority at Fox and his stature in the industry, he could have insisted his name be added to the credits. Graciously, he acknowledged Gilbert's responsibility for over 95% of the work and chose to not have himself officially credited. Given his much larger fame, his name in the credits would have overshadowed the younger, less known Gilbert's, and would have left the impression that Gilbert was more of an assistant, which was far from the case.