 Kitano conceived the idea during the shooting of  _Sonatine (1993)_ (qv). Then called Fractals, the idea was to  depict how an ordinary persons dreams would create an imaginative  world, where the dream persons dreams would create another  imaginative world and so on, going back and forth between his  actions in reality and those in his imaginary worlds. The project  was, for many reasons, put off throughout the years, until Kitano  rewrote the storyline and made himself the protagonist.