Robin Swicord Talks Memoirs of a Geisha

Posted on December 2, 2005

Martin A. Grove of The Hollywood Reporter talks to Robin Swicord, who adapted Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha for the upcoming feature film. Swicord discusses how she approached the daunting talk of adapting the bestselling novel.

"Rob and I started meeting for about six weeks," she told me. "I went to New York and we met on a daily basis. Essentially, the goal was to make an outline and out of that outline the film would or would not be green lit. So it was a very full outline. It was about 70 pages. It was essentially a screenplay without dialogue. We went to Japan after that. We went to Kyoto for two weeks to try and get a better grasp of this culture that was so foreign to both of us.
In writing "Geisha," Swicord said her approach wasn't the same as it had been on earlier screenplays for films like "Little Women" or "Practical Magic." "I wrote this in a different way than I've ever worked before," she pointed out, "because I was brought in after the director. Almost always with the films I worked on I work alone for a long time, having meetings with the producer, going through a kind of development process, sometimes meeting with the studio, but essentially I'm the only creative person on (the project), usually for a very long time. And then the director comes and there's this kind of interesting transition where the director tries to understand what it is that I'm trying to put forward and I'm trying to understand this director's vision of the project. And, frankly, that is an area where, often you see not just in my life, but in many writers' lives, where trouble begins -- where there is not a melding of visions. Sometimes the studio can be very surprised that the project that they've so carefully developed for such a long time will turn out very differently because that transition didn't happen with the director.
"In this case, this director, Rob Marshall, had a very clear vision of the film. He had a clear vision when I met him even though he didn't talk about it. When he and I started work, it became really apparent to me that he completely grasped the novel. He knew every single page of it. I've actually worked with directors who are directing an adaptation that I wrote who had never read the original novel. He knew every word that Arthur Golden had written. Mostly what we did together was I would put forward some ideas. He would describe images to me. We would put those things together in kind of an outline form and then I would sort of make recommendations about structure and the shape of a scene or whether I thought something was needed or not. It was a real collaboration. He listened to me. I listened to him."

Rob Marshall, who directed Chicago, directed Memoirs of a Geisha, which is due out in wide release on December 23rd. The film already has early Oscar buzz, and it's on our "must see list." Of course, so is Aeon Flux: we have widely varying tastes around here.