|
|
Features
|
|
Memories of a Geisha Director
For filmmaker Rob Marshall, these include everything from working with a group of actors who spoke no English to being struck by the showbiz flavors of the Geisha world.
Wednesday, December 7, 2005
By Ian Spelling
|
|
|
Dimitrios Kambouris/Wireimage.com
Photo
|
|
A visual magician
|
|
In the midst of all that Chicago 2002 Oscar season hoopla, triumphant director Rob Marshall jumped on a conference call with producers Lucy Fisher, Doug Wick and Steven Spielberg. After flirting with the idea of directing Memoirs of a Geisha himself, Spielberg was there to chime in with an invitation for Marshall to take on those duties. It’s an invitation Marshall very nearly declined.
“I didn’t really want to look at anything then because I couldn’t focus,” the filmmaker recalls during a recent interview with FilmStew in New York. “But they kept sending me bottles of sake and antique prints of Geisha and beautiful books, and it was really hard to turn away from it.”
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is it, isn’t it? This is fantastic,’” he continues. “So it was a combination for me of the world of Geisha and also the story. The central story was very moving to me, about the child who is sold into slavery and must surrender to a life that’s very difficult and with a great struggle involved and she learns to ultimately find love in a world where love is forbidden to her.”
|
|
Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
Photo
|
|
A possible Best Actress contender
|
|
|
Still, Marshall admits that from the moment he said yes to Geisha, it was an uphill climb. Novelist Arthur Golden’s flashback tale of Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang), a blue-eyed beauty who enters the mysterious world of the Geisha, is a sweeping epic that features a wide range of Asian talents, including Michelle Yeoh (as Sayuri’s mentor, Mameha), Gong Li (as Sayuri’s increasingly nasty rival, Hatsumomo), Ken Watanabe (as The Chairman, the man Sayuri comes to love, but can’t be with), and Koji Yakusho (as The Chairman’s wealthy best friend, whose affections for Sayuri mean that The Chairman cannot return Sayuri’s feelings for him).
To begin with, there was the business of attempting to pull off a period piece, in a foreign country, in a foreign language. “It was exciting and scary,” the director confesses. “There I was, working with an international group of actors, five of whom are making their English-language debut.”
“I found that something exists between director and actor sometimes that surpasses or transcends language,” Marshall maintains. “Sitting and working with them, I’m very lucky that we had the six weeks of rehearsal that we had. Because it was during that time that we sort of worked out how this would play.”
On set, Marshall’s English directives were regularly translated into Japanese or Chinese so that his actors could put forth what he was asking for. And for their part, beyond the phonetically memorized dialogue they exchanged on-camera, the various actors often could not communicate with each other.
|
|
Steve Granitz/Wireimage.com
Photo
|
|
The always rock solid Watanabe
|
|
|
“It was extraordinary,” marvels Marshall. “But we had the luxury of that rehearsal, and so by the time we got to shooting I felt it was – oddly enough - very natural. I felt we had found our way, and these are the greatest actors really in the world. I have Koji Yakusho, the Al Pacino of Japan, Gong Li, the Meryl Streep of China. I have these great actors and I felt like I was in very safe hands with them.”
Though wildly different on the face of it, Chicago and Geisha both explore rivalries between strong women. Mentioning that point to Marshall elicits an anecdote about visiting a Kaburenjo, a Geisha theater in Japan, and being shown a lift down in the basement.
“And, of course, I remember immediately Catherine Zeta Jones coming out of the floor and how we’d done that, and I thought, ‘I’ve traveled halfway across the world to do something completely different and it just dawned on me that I’m doing a movie about rival women in show business again,’” he says, laughing. “But it was obviously in a very different way.”
“That was really sort of a coincidence, although I have to say that something about the fact that Geisha are artists first,” Marshall adds. “The word Geisha means artist and the fact that dance is the highest art that they perform, it’s something that I connect to. And the discipline involved, I get.”
“So there is a connection that, honestly, I didn’t really quite make immediately. To me, it was a totally different palette, which it was, of course, and is.”
While Chicago was also drama, most people consider it a musical. But no one will mistake Geisha for a musical. “For me, telling a story is telling a story,” Marshall insists. “Telling it through dance, telling it through singing is the same thing as telling it through a dramatic piece -- because it’s a story.”
“The characters, you have to bring [them] to life,” he observes. “You have to make it feel connected to your emotions in some way; whether it’s funny, whether it’s sad, whether it’s beautiful, whether it’s cruel. And I was moved by this and excited to do it, and there is a little dance in it.”
“So there’s a little connection to the world for me. I did shoot in a theater and did have a little bit of a safety net there for myself. But I was excited to try something else.”
As far as his next cinematic challenge is concerned, Marshall expects it to be as unexpected as that conference call about Geisha. “I’m so bad at developing something while I’m working on something [else],” he admits. “I’ll probably stop now, breathe for a little bit and start reading, and something will happen. I hope.”
And Marshall shouldn’t be surprised if that something begins to take form around the time of Oscar and DGA nominations for Best Director.
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|