Word: geishas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
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...
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...
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...
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...