The Banquet
back to Memoirs of a Geisha
Memoirs of a Chinese-American Geisha
By ANNE THOMPSON
New York Times
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If the coming story in film is globalization, Memoirs of a Geisha, set for a Christmas release by Sony Pictures, may one day be seen as a movie at the tipping point. Based on an American novel about a hidden aspect of Japanese life, it relies heavily on three stars of Chinese cinema and has no white stars. The San Francisco Bay doubled for the Sea of Japan, while Ventura in Southern California housed an entire Japanese town for the shoot last fall, and the Yamashiro Restaurant in Hollywood served as a Kyoto teahouse.
Still, executives at the Japanese-owned Sony appear confident that the Wisconsin-born director Rob Marshall, best known for the Oscar-winning musical Chicago, will get it right. “It’s thrilling, theatrical and totally modern,” the Sony motion picture group chairman, Amy Pascal, said in describing the daily screenings of the film, which is set mainly in the 1930s and ’40s.
A certain complexity was probably inevitable in a movie that was born more than seven years ago as a passion project of Pascal and the producers Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher. It fell into a void after Steven Spielberg, who once saw it as a way to express his love for Japan, put it aside in favor of three successive films, culminating with Catch Me if You Can (2002). Based on a 1997 novel by Arthur Golden , the project accumulated screenplay drafts by the heavyweights Ron Bass, who shared an Oscar for Rain Man, and Akiva Goldsman, who won one for Beautiful Mind.
Other directors also had a hand in the development process. Kimberly Peirce became involved, when she was running hot after Boys Don’t Cry (1995). Spike Jonze followed after Being John Malkovich (1999). But the film, with its foreign cast and setting, was beginning to acquire a reputation for being unmakable, until Marshall decided last June to take it on.
“I thought it was the challenge of a lifetime,” he said in a recent interview.
“As a young dancer from Pittsburgh, I responded to something about surviving and believing and hoping,” Marshall said of the story of a Japanese girl who is sold by her impoverished father to a Kyoto geisha house and becomes her country’s most celebrated geisha.
Perhaps the greatest oddity in Marshall’s enterprise is that his lead geishas are played by Chinese actresses: Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Gong Li (Farewell My Concubine) and Michelle Yeoh (Tomorrow Never Dies). “There were no female Japanese actors of the right age remotely comparable to Zhang or Gong whose English was good enough,” Fisher said. “Some wouldn’t even audition.”
Marshall, a former Broadway choreographer, was particularly taken with Zhang’s background as a dancer. “I saw a lot of Japanese actors who would have had a harder time than Zhang training to be a geisha: singing, tea service, conversation and dance.”
As it happened, Marshall brought complications of his own to Memoirs. He had a contractual obligation to make his next film for Miramax Films, which had backed Chicago. He secured his release, his agent Douglas MacLaren said, by agreeing to make two future films for Miramax. Meanwhile, McLaren said, the director’s salary leapt from the $500,000 he was paid for Chicago to $5 million for Memoirs of a Geisha, plus a 5-percent cut of the first dollars the studio earns from the theaters.
Once onboard, Marshall went to work on the script with Robin Swicord, who had written Little Women for Sony. Then the playwright Doug Wright, best known for Quills, polished dialogue for the geishas.
The result is what Pascal calls “a sweeping Dr. Zhivago female epic that leads you to look through a keyhole into a private world that doesn’t exist anymore.” And Dr. Zhivago, after all, was the work of a British master, David Lean, who used the Egyptian Omar Sharif and the India-born Julie Christie to bring the Russian revolution alive.