Actor Robert Lewis functioned also as screen test director and dialogue director.
Filmed in 1943 on the MGM lot in Culver City during the Second World War, the film features an unusual assortment of non-Asian actors with odd accents playing Chinese and Japanese: Russian-born and Stanislavski-trained Akim Tamiroff as Wu Lien; Turhan Bey, Viennese born son of a Turkish father and Czechoslovakian mother as the middle son, Lao Er Tan; New England patrician Katharine Hepburn as his wife; American Aline MacMahon, no longer one of the wisecracking Gold Diggers of 1933, as the wife of Ling Tang; English born Henry Travers (best remembered as Clarence the Angel from It's a Wonderful Life) as the Third Cousin;" Irish-America J. Carrol Naish as the Japanese Kitchen Overseer; and finally Jewish-American Robert Lewis, co-founder of the Actors Studio and Meryl Streep's teacher at the Yale Drama School as the Japanese Captain Sato.
In January 1944, Harold S. Bucquet took over as director when Jack Conway became ill, and he was awarded co-director credit.
M-G-M announced that Keye Luke was cast as a "Student Lecturer" but he was not seen in the film.
On 21 October 1943, M-G-M was given permission to film exterior night scenes, not allowed since the wartime ban was instituted in 1941