Curt Chandler, Post-Gazette Rob Marshall relaxes in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, 36 floors above New York's bustling streets, to discuss his new film, "Memoirs of a Geisha.". Click photo for larger image. Listen In Rob Marshall discusses his newest project with Post-Gazette drama editor and critic Christopher Rawson: The pressure of filmmaking is offset by the pleasure of assembling fine performances in post-production. Marshall says he enjoys the newness of making a film. Creating a visual world drew Marshall to both "Chicago" and "Geisha." What will come next? A project that's a good story.

New York penetrates the inner recesses of the 35th floor of the Waldorf Towers on Park Avenue, through the journalists' holding area with its buffet of edibles, down corridors past relays of young press aides wielding headsets and Blackberrys, and there, finally, at the heart of it all in his own smaller, elegant suite, calm and composed, stands Rob Marshall, hot young film director just launching only his second movie.

He's still just Robby Marshall from Squirrel Hill (and Falk School, Allderdice and Carnegie Mellon), with maybe an extra crease or two on his smiling face as he eases into his mid-40s. He gives a friend from Pittsburgh a big smile and hug, rolling his eyes at the posh surroundings.

He sees the humor of the elaborate promotional staging, but he's at home with it, too. For someone young in the business, he's already showed his poker player's cool: If a reputation can be made with one big film, as Marshall's was with his debut, "Chicago," the 2003 Oscar winner, then a reputation can decline quickly, too.

But for his second act, Marshall chose to move as far as possible from the world of Broadway musical comedy through which he came up. His new feature is "Memoirs of a Geisha," based on Arthur Golden's popular, lush novel of love and servitude in a mysterious, tradition-rich world of art and sensuality that even native Japanese don't know well.

In short, it's a sizable risk, because it doesn't cater to the young men who make up the largest movie audience. It's a romantic tale, sumptuous and exotic; it's foreign; and its stars, some of whom had to learn English on the job, are largely unknown to Americans.

So inevitably the producers (an interlocking web of big names) are promoting the director and his batting average, which is 1,000 so far. That means pressure. But Marshall is at ease with the choice he made more than two years ago, and he glows with pleasure over the result. At the heart of this tall Manhattan beehive, he looks relaxed.

"I do?" he says, and laughs. "But this is the best part of it, because the work is done. I just finished this movie, literally, let me see, a week ago Saturday, so it's only been two weeks."

But the work has taken two years.

It started "with a call during the 'Chicago' award season from Lucy Fischer, Doug Wick and Steven Spielberg, the producers, saying, 'We've seen the movie, we think you're right for this, we want you to consider it.' I couldn't really focus on it at that point, because I wasn't ready to think about what was next.

"But they kept sending me bottles of sake and antique prints of geisha and geisha books." He pauses to laugh at the idea of wooing him with liquor: "I think I'm the only one who went to the Ichiriki tea house, the oldest in Kyoto, and asked for white wine."

	Edko Film Co. via AP Zhang Ziyi experiences success and entrapment in an "unbelievably cruel and hard profession that is such a mixture of beauty and cruelty" says Marshall of the lead character in his film "Memoirs of a Geisha." Click photo for larger image.

As "Chicago" swept through its awards season, Marshall was besieged with offers to direct. But eventually "Geisha" caught his attention. "The reason it intrigued me was a series of things. I wanted to do something entirely different from 'Chicago,' but I also thought this is the time to challenge yourself. ... I was in a position now that I could do something that is rarely done -- the fact that this is an all-Asian cast, the fact that it's a period movie, those kinds of movies are rarely made. I thought, 'Take advantage of that position,' because careers go like this, up and down, so I thought, 'Do it now.' "

His agent said, "Maybe this is the third movie, not the second movie," but he decided, "No, let's risk now, this is the time to risk. There were two things about the project that immediately caught my eye. One was the obvious fact that this incredibly hidden, sensual, exotic world is so fascinating. I thought, 'I could spend two years of my life, enriching my life, learning about it.' It's like doing your doctorate. What a wonderful way to learn.

"The second part of it I loved is the emotional story being told about this child sold into slavery who surrenders her life to this unbelievably cruel and hard profession that is such a mixture of beauty and cruelty. ... It's very Dickensian. ... I fell in love with that emotional story.

"So this was the one. And the biggest reason was that I was scared, so I thought, 'Go, do something scary, something really hard.' "

First steps

But first he had to get out of the optional picture he'd promised Miramax, producers of "Chicago." Loudly publicized disputes with Harvey Weinstein followed. "It took a lot of negotiation," Marshall says drily. "The real champion was Amy Pascal," the president of Columbia Pictures, who made it happen.

He made it clear he didn't want any of the scripts already written, that he needed "to take the journey from the beginning. So I threw all those away. I began with the book. I sat with Arthur Golden for many sessions, then went on my way to choose a writer, Robin Swicord. It was important to have a woman's point of view. ... She's a fantastic technician, and I really needed to find a way to take this 400-page novel and turn it into a movie."

They started that in January 2004. "We had index cards of the entire book. We started outlining the movie, pulling away things, trying to find the spine of it, inventing things, coming up with things that needed adjustment. ... But we were basically very faithful, because I knew it was a beloved book. I wanted to serve that anyway, because it's good. You take what's good.

	Phil Klein, Associated Press Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi poses with Rob Marshall during an appearance two weeks ago at a benefit screening of "Geisha" for the Santa Barbara Film Festival. Click photo for larger image.

"While we were writing we started the casting process. And during that time I took my entire team to Japan" -- all the designers, producers, writers, designers. It was much the same team Marshall worked with on "Chicago," including his longtime mate, John DeLuca, who served as co-producer, choreographer and second-unit director.

"We just immersed ourselves in the culture, went to teahouses, walked the streets at night, were entertained by geisha, saw an apprentice geisha get made up from start to finish."

That special culture still exists. "It's very different. Children aren't sold into geisha houses any more. Virginity is not sold to the highest bidder any more. Now it's like a girl in high school, age 16 or something, says, 'I would like to be a geisha,' mostly to study the traditional arts, as a girl would say, 'I want to go to the school of the American Ballet.'

"The misconception from Westerners is that they're prostitutes. What they don't know is that the word 'geisha' means artist and there's this brutal training -- to dance, which is the highest art, sing, play the samisen, the art of conversation, calligraphy, it's really demanding.

"I spoke to geisha who get up at 7 a.m. to start classes, get home about 4 p.m., go right into getting ready for the evening, go out from teahouse to teahouse to teahouse -- they can visit 10 teahouses a night -- then it's 2 a.m., they go to sleep for a few hours and back up again."

Making 'Memoirs'

With the writing and casting done, next came pre-production, living in Los Angeles while designing the movie and trying to figure out where to shoot it. They looked at Australia and Vancouver but settled on Los Angeles.

"I had to build the [whole] town, because we couldn't find any [appropriate] place in Japan that wasn't modernized." They needed to be able to create all four seasons and both pre- and post-war Japan. So a whole village was built in Ventura, Calif., complete with a river and bridges.

They rehearsed for six weeks. Movies don't usually rehearse that much, but Marshall comes from the stage. On "Chicago" he had to get his stars to dance; for "Geisha," he says, "we called it geisha boot camp."

He had seven rooms running at once -- he was in one, working on a scene; DeLuca was in another with dancers; an American geisha expert was in a third; then there were two rooms for dialect work and others for kimonos, hair and makeup and the samisen.

	Curt Chandler, Post-Gazette Rob Marshall: "The word 'geisha' means artist and there's this brutal training -- to dance, which is the highest art, sing, play the samisen, the art of conversation, calligraphy, it's really demanding." Click photo for larger image.

An unexpected benefit of rehearsal was giving the five (of eight) leads who didn't speak English a chance to practice, while Marshall learned how to use (or transcend the need for) interpreters, both for Japanese and Chinese. It worked so well that often when filming, he and the actors understood each other without language.

Filming began Sept. 29, 2004. They shot in L.A., northern California and Japan and finished Feb. 1, 2005. The next day they had a news conference in Tokyo. Marshall then took 10 days off and on Valentine's Day started to edit.

The first edit came to about three hours; the final result is two hours and 20 minutes. Marshall calls editing "the final rewrite."

Then came the music. The veteran and many-Oscared John Williams came to Marshall, saying, "I've never asked to do a movie before." It was Williams who suggested using Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman as soloists to create interwoven musical themes.

That brings the full two-year journey back to the present and the all-important penultimate phase, which is promoting the film in interviews and at premieres and special screenings. There had been carefully orchestrated print and TV stories all along, creating awareness of the title and heightening anticipation with glimpses of the art decoration and the stars, led by Chinese beauty Ziyi Zhang. ("Z's not a starlet -- Z's an actor -- there's a difference," says Marshall.)

Making the rounds

The press offensive began in earnest once the film was finished. There were screenings in L.A., including for the Directors Guild, Screen Actors Guild and Below the Line, a newspaper for movie crews. At the Directors Guild screening, "Sydney Pollack interviewed me afterward -- a director interviews a director," Marshall says. "Then we had the SAG screening, which was very exciting, because I walked out on stage with the actors to a full standing ovation."

The print interviews in New York were Nov. 18, followed by a day for TV and a third day for foreign press. Then it was off to London for more international press and BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) screenings, and from there right to Japan for the Nov. 29 world premiere.

As is usual with the Marshalls, that was a family junket, with sisters Maura and Kathleen and Maura's husband, Dennis Powell, all accompanying Marshall and DeLuca, leaving parents Bob and Anne to take care of the family dogs.

They were all back from Japan for the Dec. 4 American premiere at Hollywood's Kodak Theatre, the new home of the Academy Awards, then returned to New York for Tuesday's premiere there, plus "lots of things, like 'The Charlie Rose Show,' " a Marshall favorite.

Next comes Italy, with premieres in Rome and Milan, then Madrid, "all before Christmas. Then after Christmas, we go back to the London premiere and then to Paris!"

It sounds more frantic than for most films, but "Geisha" is international and needs to be promoted accordingly.

If all goes well, this promotion phase will imperceptibly ease into the awards season, but Marshall has a proper superstition about this: "It's always so dangerous, it scares me to talk about [possible awards]. It feels like bad luck."

It all adds up to a cycle of more than 2 1/2 years, from making the deal to accepting the last award. And which of the many phases does Marshall enjoy the most?

"The hardest part is the shooting," he says, "because of the hours and the pressure. That's the most exhausting. You have to be constantly creative and facile.

"But the most enjoyable is post-production. You have all the pieces. It's quiet, everybody's gone. It's just John, me and [editor] Pietro [Scalia], quietly finding performances. It's like a mosaic."

Marshall is quick to say he'll be back someday to work on Broadway, where he has had six Tony nominations as choreographer and director, but movie-making "is so new still. I'm still learning. It's so exciting." He laughs: "And I never took a film course in my life."

Scripts for his possible next project are already piling up. Maybe it's already come or maybe it's still coming, the call that leads to his next journey of several years.

Itsuo Inouye, Associated Press Director Rob Marshall, second left, poses with the cast of "Memoirs of a Geisha" before its world premiere in Tokyo last month. The film opens in Pittsburgh Dec. 23. From left are: John DeLuca, Marshall, Japanese actress Kaori Momoi, Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh, Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi, Japanese actors, Ken Watanabe and Koji Yakusho, Japanese actresses, Yuki Kudo and Suzuka Ogo, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa. Click photo for larger image