US movie makers have flirted with Asia in the past, but with 'Memoirs of a Geisha', Hollywood seems to be embarking on a serious relationship with Japanese culture (and Chinese actors). Davin O'Dwyermeets the film's director Rob Marshall and its controversial star, Ziyi Zhang
Everybody knows that China is due to assume superpower status sometime after hosting the Olympics in 2008, and money watchers are all too aware that Japan's economy is getting all tigerish again, but you know Asia is really on the move when one of the biggest releases of Hollywood's Oscar season is a Japanese-set period piece featuring three of China's biggest actors and barely a Western face in sight. For a Hollywood epic, Memoirs of a Geisha is unique.
The film is based on Arthur Golden's novel, a period tale of unrequited love wrapped in the exotic world of Japan's geisha culture. It became a publishing phenomenon in 1997, spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than four million copies in English. With success like that, the studios were always going to try to give it a cinematic treatment.
Hollywood's relationship with Asian cinema has been marked by occasional dalliances such as The Last Emperor and appreciative acclaim for Asian movies such as Farewell My Concubine or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It has more recently taken the form of a slight flirtation, with Japanese horror movies, and Hong Kong thrillers regularly getting Hollywood makeovers. The release of Memoirs of a Geisha, however, constitutes a full-blown love affair.
"It's a big celebration of Asian culture," star Ziyi Zhang says of Memoirs. Her role as the geisha Sayuri, sold into virtual slavery as a child before rising to become the most desired of all geishas, promises to make her a star. Her breakthrough role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon might have brought her to prominence, but this part ought to seal her reputation as one of the most exciting and powerful actors at work in cinema today. Her porcelain-white face currently adorns countless billboards across the US. Her sharp blue eyes gaze out as if surveying the land she is about to conquer.
This Asian invasion has been partly engineered by the king of Hollywood himself, Steven Spielberg. He was long attached to direct the film, before becoming executive producer and passing directorial duties to the Oscar-nominated director of Chicago, Rob Marshall.
"It was daunting, because it's such a beloved novel, 400 pages worth of novel," Marshall says. "The first thing I did was take my entire creative team to Japan, and we just immersed ourselves in the culture; we had so much to learn. We were entertained by geisha, saw an apprentice geisha get made up, went to sumo wrestling matches, saw how kimono were made. I spent two years researching and learning about this world, because I had to. That said, I also knew that this was a fable . . . so I felt like I could give my artistic impression of the world."
While Marshall's willingness to take liberties with the realities of geisha culture raised some hackles, it was as nothing to the controversy provoked by his casting decisions. Ziyi Zhang, of course, won the hotly contested part of Sayuri. Former Bond girl and fellow Crouching Tiger star Michelle Yeoh was cast as the elegant Mameha, Sayuri's teacher, while acclaimed actor Gong Li made her English-language debut as Hatsumomo, Sayuri's bitter nemesis.
That is an impressive cast list by any measure, except for one crucial detail - none of the actors is Japanese. Zhang and Li are Chinese, Yeoh is Chinese-Malaysian. When two neighbouring countries have as fraught a history as Japan and China, these things invariably matter, and there have been many accusations of Western cultural ignorance.
Marshall is obviously well-versed in responding to those claims. "I looked at every Japanese actor in Japan, but my job as director is to find the best one for the role. I have a very simple philosophy about casting, and that is you cast the best person for the role . . . Non-traditional casting is part of film-making, from Vivien Leigh playing Scarlett O'Hara on. When you think of Egyptian-born Omar Sharif as Russian Dr Zhivago or Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones . . . I could go on for three hours. They're acting; you look for the best actors. We had casting directors all over the world. These actors were head and shoulders above everybody else I saw."
About Zhang, he is particularly effusive. "An actor like her comes along once in a generation. There are a lot of starlets who are pretty and have some talent, but I don't think there are that many great actors, and that is what she is."
For Zhang, this controversy is perhaps the only awkward aspect of winning a role she had coveted since first reading the book more than five years ago. But she's quick to draw parallels between the fictional life of Sayuri and her own upbringing.
"I can relate to her because when I was young I went to boarding school. When I was 11 I started the traditional Chinese dance training for six years, and that was really tough. There were so many troubles, I can totally empathise with [ Sayuri]," she says. "After six years, I wanted to run away, and then I decided to learn acting, and that's when I went to acting college."
The determination that characterises so many of her roles is entirely absent in person. She is amiable, almost giddy, in turns eloquent and funny, even in a language she admits to struggling with.
"We called it the geisha boot camp," she says of the training regime for the film. "It was a torture room. The hardest thing to learn was the shamizen [ a traditional Japanese string instrument] very hard, and it was only for two seconds in the movie. Every day we spent three hours putting the make-up on and finishing the hair, and an hour putting on the kimono. We couldn't eat and drink, because it was so hard to go to the bathroom, you didn't want to bother them. 'Please, no juice.' "
The sequence that most benefits from Marshall's "Impressionist" treatment was Sayuri's "coming out" dance, at which she announces her true arrival as a geisha. With falling snow and harsh blue lights, the scene is more MTV than Madam Butterfly. What really impresses, though, is Sayuri's massive shoes, huge black slabs more than a foot tall.
"That was really hard. The first time I saw them in the rehearsal rooms, I thought they were a prop. Michelle said they must be a handbag. The choreographer said they were my shoes, 'You have to dance in them.' 'You gotta be kidding?' He was just like 'You gotta do that girl!' I practised that dance for five hours a day for six weeks."
Yeoh and Zhang are both trained dancers, a definite advantage in capturing the elegance of the geisha and the variety of skills they must develop. "With the heavy kimonos in particular," says Yeoh, "it was very hard to achieve that fluid movement of a geisha. Those kimonos can be very restrictive. It required a lot of work." As Zhang points out, though, the physically restrictive kimono is a manifestation of the larger restrictions placed on the geisha. "The way the kimono holds you, you want to run, but you can't, you have to take really small steps. It was like in China, the women had bound feet, so you couldn't run away. So I think about that, for geisha . . . even though the kimono can hold the body, it cannot hold your emotions. Geisha can think, they can talk, but they cannot love, they are not allowed. They have no freedom. They don't have their own life.
"I don't like the white make-up, because when you wear the make-up, you are acting, you are not yourself. Maybe in the geisha house, those girls fighting, maybe that's real life. But when they walk out of the geisha house, they become like a puppet."
When asked what she has sacrificed in pursuing her own career, Zhang admits that her life is too busy for a relationship at the moment. "Just like geishas, artists have to compromise, to sacrifice something. The good thing is I love my profession, because I cansee different women's worlds, and their different lives, like these showgirls, these geisha."
As China becomes an increasingly powerful political and economic player, it is hard not to see Zhang becoming the popular face of the new superpower, an embodiment of the new China, the cultural export to rival the industrial ones. "I don't want to be the face, I don't want to have those kind of responsibilities," she protests. "I can represent only myself; I don't want to give myself too much pressure."
But as Sayuri finds out, destiny can be hard to control. A lot like her country, Ziyi Zhang's time is coming, and her face is destined to dominate those billboards for a long time to come.
Memoirs of a Geisha opens on Friday