While making “Memoirs of a Geisha,” Rob Marshall was afraid of it becoming “Lost in Translation II.”
“I had five of my eight principals making their English-language debut,” says the director who guided “Chicago” to a best-picture Oscar win. “So even if you could speak some English, when we were talking very specifically about a moment or some subtext or something, it was very important that it was communicated well. So I had Japanese and Chinese interpreters on the set.”
“Geisha,” which opens Friday, features an almost all-Asian cast that includes many top international stars. But, being an $80 million Hollywood historical production, it had to be in English.
“Speaking English was a big obstacle,” admits Ziyi Zhang, the rising 26-year-old Chinese star of such martial-arts films as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Hero” and “House of Flying Daggers.”
Zhang also had to learn all of the geisha skills for her role of Sayuri, an impoverished young girl indentured to a geisha house who grows into a popular performer of the 1930s. “[The role] was not easy to handle–it’s very deep and complex. You have to learn to control all of the emotions. I just tried my very best.”
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But the elaborate costumes and complex manners were only part of the director’s wider communication challenge on the production, which was shot mostly in California.
“What’s important is how do you use the second language to get into your character,” says Zhang, who had made an American movie, “Rush Hour 2,” where she had few lines as a Triad assassin.
One of those first-time English speakers was another icon of Chinese cinema, Gong Li (“Farewell, My Concubine,” “Raise the Red Lantern”). She plays Hatsumomo, an older geisha who abuses the child Sayuri and becomes a jealous rival when the girl blossoms into a perfectly kimono-clad embodiment of the art form’s dancing, musical, conversation-making and other traditional skills.
For Gong, who apparently got the hang of the new language quick enough to jump into Michael Mann’s “Miami Vice” movie and an upcoming Hannibal Lecter prequel, what felt most natural was finding an Asian role that did not conform to standard Hollywood stereotypes.
“In the past, if a Hollywood director wanted me to play a character, typically she was a stereotypical Asian woman who gets in a fight and killed off very quickly,” Gong says. “That didn’t have much interest for me. But what really sold me with this particular script was its genuine Asian topic–and a really great character in Hatsumomo.”
However proficient she may be in her new language, Gong made that statement through an interpreter.
The film’s third featured actress, however, was right at home–except for, maybe, the slight Japanese accent everyone was trained to speak with. Raised in the former British colony of Malaysia, Hong Kong action star Michelle Yeoh grew up speaking English.
So, no language lessons for the trained ballerina, who’s appeared in everything from Cantonese Jackie Chan comedies to “Crouching Tiger” to the James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies.” Still, it was she who coined the Seven Rooms of Torture phrase to describe the preproduction geisha training facility.
“But nothing prepared me for how rigid and disciplined [geisha’s] had to be,” says Yeoh, who plays Sayuri’s mentor Mameha.
“It’s tough on a different level,” Yeoh says when asked to compare geisha behavior to making action movies. “This is not a physical movie, in that sense, but I think the mental torture of this movie was much harder. I’d rather run on rooftops; that’s easy to do.”