| Hey all, I know some of you are as psyched about this as much as I am. Today's NY Times has a little piece about the film Memoirs of a Geisha (btw, it's due out Christmastime, I wonder if it will garner any Oscar nods)
Here's the article in full, but for those of you who can get onto the Times website, there is a beautiful photo of the stars accompanying the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/06/movies/06thom.html
Anyway, it's making my mouth water! Can't wait!
February 6, 2005
MEMOIRS OF A CHINESE-AMERICAN GEISHA
By Anne Thompson
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 chairwoman, Amy Pascal, said in describing the daily screenings of the film, which is set mainly in the 1930's and 1940's.
A certain complexity was probably inevitable in a movie that was born more than seven years ago as a passion project of Ms. Pascal and the producers Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher. It fell into a void after Steven Spielberg, who once saw it as 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 "A 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 Mr. 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" Mr. 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 Mr. Marshall's enterprise is that his lead geishas are played by Chinese actresses: Ziyi Zhang ("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," Ms. Fisher said. "Some wouldn't even audition."
Mr. Marshall, a former Broadway choreographer, was particularly taken with Ms. Zhang's background as a dancer. "I saw a lot of Japanese actors who would have had a harder time than Ziyi training to be a geisha: singing, tea service, conversation and dance."
As it happened, Mr. 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, Mr. 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 on board, Mr. 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 Ms. 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.
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