To create the desaturated pastel effect image of the movie, director of photography Oswald Morris used a unique dye transfer technique that uses broad-cut black and white matrices. This causes the separation, and contains the other two colors before recombining to create the desired effect. A silver layer was later added in the 4th pass.
When John Huston first met Ray Bradbury to discuss writing the screenplay, Bradbury admitted, "I've never been able to read the damned thing." Huston simply asked Bradbury to come back the next day to start working and, handing him a copy of the book, said, "Just go home and read what you can."