- Backed by the Pentagon: The armed forces let the filmmakers do extensive location work and numerous large scale action sequences on active military bases, even allowing the producers to build a partial replica of the USS Nevada at Battleship Row. Some scenes even had real-life military personnel in bit parts and as extras.
- Beam Me Up, Scotty!: It makes for a great movie line but there is no evidence that Admiral Yamamoto ever said the "sleeping giant" quote commonly attributed to him. He had similar sentiments, but prior to the film he was never quoted as saying even a similar line.
- Box Office Bomb: Budget, $25.5 million. Box office, $29,548,291. This film began the disintegration in the relationship between Fox chairman Darryl F. Zanuck and his son Richard. Shortly after this film, Richard fired his father's girlfriend, producer Genevieve Gilles, which led Darryl to convince the Fox board to fire Richard, which led his ex-wife and Richard's mother Virginia to convince shareholders to fire Darryl. Richard won the feud and became a long-running producer that helped the careers of Steven Spielberg, Tim Burton, and other Hollywood heavyweights, while Darryl never worked in Hollywood again. It was also part of a series of Fox flops that put the studio in dire straits until Star Wars. As for the crew of the film, it's the final co-American film co-director Kinji Fukasaku ever took part in and put dents in the careers of the writers and co-director Richard Fleischer. All this said, it would eventually be Vindicated by Cable and gain notoriety for its groundbreaking visual effects.
- Cast the Expert: Jason Robards (General Short) was a Navy sailor stationed at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack. He was not present, as his ship was out to sea at the time.
- Enforced Method Acting: A radio-controlled aircraft was supposed to roll down the runway past a bunch of extras, and then blow up. The model was specifically constructed to not be able to generate enough lift to take off, and yet it started to take off nonetheless. The model was equipped with a self-destruct that could be triggered in a case like this, but the detonation charge failed to halt the now runaway, and on fire, model. It went out of control and swerved towards the extras, who then really did start running for their lives as the completely berserk contraption smashed through a group of static mockups of other P-40s. However, because the entire accident looked on film like something that plausibly would have happened during the real attack note and since nobody was killed, director Richard Fleischer decided to keep the happy accident in the finished film.
- Fatal Method Acting: During aerial rehearsals prior to shooting in Oahu, Hawaii, a Vultee BT-13, modified to resemble a Japanese Val dive-bomber, crashed in a sugar-cane field in Ewa, killing pilot Guy Thomas Strong.
- Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: The Japanese dub offers an interesting case: All the American characters are dubbed to Japanese, while for obvious reasons the Japanese ones keeps their original voices intact. The only exception on this rule was the dub voice for the Japanese ambassador in the U.S., Kichisaburo Nomura, who was played by Shôgo Shimada in-film, but dubbed in Japanese by Kiyoshi Kobayashi instead. In this case, this is justified, since Nomura speaks mostly in English due to his diplomatic role.
- Throw It In!: The B-17 crash-landing was a real accident during filming.
- What Could Have Been: The movie was originally slated to be directed by two of the most respected filmmakers in the world at the time: David Lean (American side) and Akira Kurosawa (Japanese side). Lean pulled out early in production. Kurosawa continued on for a while, until he was told that the Japanese section had been shortened to 90 minutes (the script Kurosawa had written was four hours long). Despite this, Kurosawa did begin production, but was replaced after three weeks. His experiences with Tora! Tora! Tora! and the failure of his next film Dodesukaden led to his Creator Breakdown in 1971.
- Another story told about Kurosawa's involvement and firing was that he seemed to not be taking the film seriously and was acting increasingly erratic, causing massive delays. He had, according to an article in Military History Quarterly, hired Japanese business executives as opposed to actual actors to play major roles, including that of Admiral Yamamoto note . Further, the notoriously autocratic director started throwing temper tantrums on set, including hitting the clapboard person with a script over an unspecified slight. He also demanded changes on the sets that the audience would never even notice note . He began arguing with the producers about the budget. And he started wearing a helmet on set for the hell of it. And with all this, after months of production, Kurosawa had managed only six minutes of footage, none of it useable. Richard Williams, after trying to work with Kurosawa, finally had to fly to Japan and fire the great director, only to have Kurosawa threaten suicide by seppuku, a threat he did not carry out. The whole affair made it all the way to Fox's chairman, Darryl Zanuck, who in a fury demanded the film become an American-only production. It was only when Williams, who championed the "tell the story from both sides" angle, reminded Zanuck that the sets built in Japan at great expense were still useable that Zanuck relented.
- It's often claimed that John Ford was originally hired to direct the American segments, although this isn't the case. According to Ford's biographer Joseph McBride, he was interested in directing the film and informed Twentieth Century Fox of his interest through intermediaries, but Darryl Zanuck never seriously considered hiring Ford because his poor health made him unable to direct such a large-scale project.
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