Wayne Wang chose to adapt A Thousand Years of Good Prayers into a film because it reminded him of all the Ozu films he so admired when he was a film student.
They try to visualise Japan in 1956 and talk about the late Yasujirō Ozu, whose films often depict this very era.
Mikio Naruse (1905–1969) and Yasujirō Ozu (1903–1963) were two prominent directors considered to work primarily in the field of shomin-geki.
After a four year hiatus, he returned to the Japanese screen in two 1929 films and no fewer than eleven 1930 films, including Sono yo no tsuma and Ojosan, both directed by Yasujirō Ozu.
Trần is strongly influenced by French cinema and from some European and Japanese filmmakers, namely Bergman, Bresson, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky and Ozu.
Some of the most critically acclaimed drama films in Asian cinema were produced during the 1950s, including Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1954), Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959), Guru Dutt's Pyaasa (1957), and the Akira Kurosawa films Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952) and Seven Samurai (1954).
Years later, it provided an inspiration for the script of Tokyo Story (1953), written by Noda and director Yasujiro Ozu.
In wider shots within the ceremonies, the camera often focuses on one side of the clan's seating arrangement at the ceremony, framed so that everyone in the frame is facing the same direction, similar to the family meal scene at the end of Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story.