The Making of a Geisha

The girl from a fishing village must learn to be a lady. A special sort of lady: a geisha, one of the “wives of nightfall” who for centuries have entertained Japanese gentlemen with delicacy, wit and performance skills. At 15, Chiyo has these graces only in embryo; but a famous geisha, Mameha, sees how they might flower. She begins the girl’s education sternly. “That is a perfect bow. For a pig farmer.” “Rise. Not like a horse.” And slowly the eager student with the “watery” gray eyes grows into a captivating woman known as Nitta Sayuri. Hatsumomo, another geisha, sees Sayuri’s promise as a threat. She spits a warning at the girl: “I will destroy you.”

Arthur Golden’s 1997 best seller, Memoirs of a Geisha, enticed readers with its authoritative evocation of an alien, exotic world, one in which women served men less with sexual favors than by creating a simulacrum of the feminine ideal. But the book’s real pull was its take on the Cinderella story, with Sayuri as the young heroine, Mameha as the fairy godmother, Hatsumomo as the evil stepmother and the Chairman, a powerful client of the geishas, as Sayuri’s prince charming.

Now director Rob Marshall, whose first big film was the 2002 musical Chicago, has made this fairy tale into an emotionally sumptuous love story. This intimate epic spans almost two decades, but its script, by Robin Swicord and Doug Wright, never hurries past the telling biographical detail of its four main characters. Nor does the movie’s visual splendor ever obscure the furtive, assertive heart beating under the kimono. It’s still early in the season of Oscar contenders, but Geisha has a shot to join Chicago as a Best Picture champ.

In the cast is a roster of A-list Asian actors. Ziyi Zhang, of the worldwide kung fu hits Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers, plays Sayuri. Gong Li, mainland China’s first international star, is Hatsumomo. Michelle Yeoh, another Crouching Tiger eminence, who was also a Bond girl (Tomorrow Never Dies), is Mameha. And Ken Watanabe, the Oscar-nominated warrior of The Last Samurai, is the Chairman.

These are some of the finest, most glamorous actors on the globe. But their combined name value means little at the U.S. box office. “I’ve gotta believe, in the job that I do, that when you give the audience something that they haven’t seen before, they are going to like it,” Amy Pascal, Sony Pictures’ movie chief, says of her studio’s $80 million investment. “I’m hoping the film appeals to people who have ever been in love.”

Or in love with movies, for Geisha revives the sweeping spirit both of old-fashioned, mature film romance and of a day when Hollywood believed it could tell stories of any country or culture. Purists may complain that the three main geishas are played by Chinese women speaking English. But anyone familiar with current Chinese and Japanese films will tell you that one country is rich in top actresses and the other isn’t. Besides, says Marshall, “I cast for the role, period.”

The movie’s narration begins, “A story like mine should never be told,” and on screen it almost wasn’t. Not long after the book became a sensation, Steven Spielberg signed on to direct; five years and many scripts later, he bowed out while staying on as a producer. Lucy Fisher, a producer, jokes that her next choice was David Lean, “but he wasn’t available,” having died in 1991. Other directors expressed interest, but none stuck. Then, in 2002, Fisher and her producing partner Douglas Wick saw Chicago and figured they had their man. “Geishas are trained much like dancers, and as a choreographer and a former dancer who understands disciplined training, Rob had a natural affinity for their life,” says Wick. He and Fisher pursued the director as one would a geisha–sending him bottles of sake, antique prints. “I tried to put the gifts away,” says Marshall, “but I couldn’t. They hooked me.”

Having made the first movie musical smash since Grease 24 years before, Marshall was ready to try something old (since Geisha is also a star-is-born saga, like 42nd Street) that was, for him, radically new (a drama set in a foreign culture he knew little about). “As a director, you should choose a project that will educate you and enrich your life, because you’re going to be doing it for two years. And I thought, ‘This is that for me.’ The scariest part was being able to be educated enough about Japan and the world of geisha to be able to interpret it.”

Spielberg doesn’t question the choice of Marshall either. “When I saw Rob’s version of Geisha,” he says, “I realized that he was a much better choice than me. I like that it was like Kabuki theater. The pauses, the looks of the characters, were all little moments of directorial authorship. The close-ups of the hands in pouring the tea. The shots of the geishas’ kimono trains wriggling like the tail of a fish through a stream. Rob took the liquid metaphor of the water in Sayuri’s eyes and created a river of images. It seemed to be planned by the heart. But it was planned. He had a picture in his mind, and he fought until the picture was on film.”

Shooting mostly in California, with a few locations in Japan (including a Kyoto temple whose head monk granted access because he was a fan of Chicago), Marshall got beautiful performances from his cast. Suzuka Ohgo, as the young Chiyo, brings an elfin gravity to the first 40 minutes of the film. Zhang, 26, blossoms persuasively from a girl of 15 to a woman in her early 30s, and Watanabe lends his warmth and regal machismo to the Chairman. But it’s Gong Li, in a Bette Davis bitch-goddess role, who strides away with the picture. Her stiletto stare can burn in passion or turn on a rival with Freon fury. Facing it, one child extra started sobbing and had to be replaced.

Even in early films like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, Gong Li had a smoldering star quality. So a diva like Hatsumomo fits her like a cheongsam. She thinks she knows why her character is so mean to Sayuri. “In those days, a geisha could not have her own love,” she says, speaking through an interpreter, “so she had a lover secretly. She’s been deprived of her own love, her own feelings. She has great love and great hate. I thought she might have had the same kind of upbringing as Sayuri. She might have been beaten. Then she turned into a great geisha. I thought there must be someone like her in the world …” The actress begins to cry, which makes the interpreter cry too.

Tears were plentiful on the Geisha set. For Hatsumomo’s final, incendiary face-off with Sayuri, Gong Li stayed on the set all day, crying, never getting out of character. Marshall recalls, with awe in his voice, that “hour after hour, as people worked around her, lighting and moving cable, she stood there weeping, because she couldn’t leave that feeling. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.” After the actress filmed her last scene, she couldn’t let go. “When Rob Marshall announced that I had wrapped my role and was leaving,” she says, “all of a sudden I just didn’t know where to go.” After the wrap she asked Marshall to go through the rooms of the geisha house set with her. They held hands, walking from room to room, never speaking.

Zhang says she too cried every day: “Playing her was my most emotional role.” And Yeoh, in mock exasperation, says, “Everyone else got to cry. But Mameha couldn’t. She was always in control. The mask was maintained the whole time. All my crying was off camera. After Rob would cut the scene, I’d have to go to the side to let it out.” She credits Marshall with guiding the actors into a true ensemble. “He is very much like Mameha,” she says. “He is playing a chess game. He knows all the moves and the countermoves. He planned it all out. I used to say to him, ‘You’re like silk and steel.’ He has a very tough interior. But a director has to be that way.”

A director has to be a chairman and a doctor, a lot of Mameha and a little Hatsumomo. And here, Marshall carries it off. “The very word geisha means artist,” Mameha tells Chiyo. “And to be a geisha is to be judged as a moving work of art.” That definition suits the film as well. Geisha is a geisha: a vibrant work of art that entertains us for a few hours, then disappears into the night, taking our beguiled hearts with it.