1/19/2024 0 Comments Memories of a geisha filmWhen it was discovered that the traditional dances performed by geishas lacked the kineticism the filmmakers were after, they did what filmmakers have always done: They took liberties. "How they ate, how they moved, everything." "And then he sent me 66 pages of notes he'd taken" on the private realm of the geisha. "Arthur Golden called me five minutes later," Myhre says, still sounding surprised. Arthur Golden had done such a good job of describing this world I wanted to represent it visually in a way that would give viewers the same experience I'd had as a reader."Īnd so he asked the film's producers if he might talk to the book's author, not necessarily expecting that such a conversation would ever really take place. ![]() ![]() Reading it, I was transported to another place. "You can't beat the book for inspiration," he says of the novel, which spent two years on The New York Times' best-seller list and has been translated into 32 languages. Though his thousands of photographs proved helpful in designing his Kyoto copy, Myhre needed more than snapshots to aid him in constructing the intimate interior world of Sayuri, the woman caught in a battle for top-geisha status with Hatsumomo, her conniving nemesis. "It was really like making an old Hollywood film from the '30s or '40s, the kind they used to make at MGM," he says, referring to the era when production designers were expected to fashion the entire land of Oz on a dusty studio backlot. In that short amount of time, he and his team erected some 40 Japanese-style structures, most of them three stories tall dug and filled a 250-foot-long river and created five separate cobblestone streets, connecting them with alleyways. Shooting schedules being what they are, Myhre had only about 14 weeks in which to build his slice of city. And they're well aware that in an imperfect world, perfection is manufactured more often than it is found. More than 80 years later, moviemakers are still among the world's most expert illusionists, relentless in their pursuit of perfection. DeMille let the beaches of San Luis Obispo, California, stand in for the deserts of Egypt in his original version of The Ten Commandments. ![]() Indeed, when people speak of the fabled Hollywood magic, they're often referring to the kind of exquisite fakery that has been fooling audiences ever since Cecil B. But missing from discussion of the film, in which actresses of Chinese and Malaysian descent were cast as Japanese women, was the acknowledgment that Hollywood has always been perfectly happy to create its own alternatives to the real thing. The evocative movie Memoirs of a Geisha opened in American theaters last December, drawing crowds with its stylish depiction of a geisha's life in pre-World War II Japan, earning itself a pair of Golden Globe nominations and provoking a mini-controversy about ethnicity in casting.
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