The film was started in October 1941 with Jean Marais and Micheline Presle as "La clé des songes" but because of the war, the production shut down a few weeks later only to be resumed ten years later with a different cast.
The film is an adaptation of the play 'Juliette ou la Clef des Songes' written in 1927, which premiered in Paris in 1930 at 'Falconetti''s Théâtre de l'Atelier', directed by Alberto Cavalcanti
Ken Russell planned an English-language remake of this film in the early 1970s, but it never eventuated.
Carne hesitated between hiring Cloutier or Leslie Caron (at that point not well known) but by the time he decided Caron had been signed by MGM to go to Hollywood.