When producing "Millennium Actress", Kon created a unique combination of both his memories and his imagination, striving to make "Millennium Actress" and "Perfect Blue" two different interpretations of the same concept; a story told from two different perspectives. His intention was to have the two films as sister films. The film also presents various references to Japanese history, including the Edo period and Manchukuo, and gives it a nostalgic aesthetic. It is seen not as a sequence of events unfolding in real time, but rather in a retrospective, lighthearted point of view.