Wary Geisha crew gussied up California
From Borys Kit

LOS ANGELES—In an age when period films are shot globally and in countries with the most incentives and the cheapest labour, “Memoirs of a Geisha,” which opens Friday, bucked the trend by shooting mostly in California.
A key aspect that kept the production in-state was the search for a hanamachi, a geisha district, in which most of the movie is set. Japan was ruled out because “there were not a series of streets or rivers or bridges that weren’t touched by the modern world,” according to director Rob Marshall, who wanted the same love for detail and accuracy to go into his production as was in Arthur Golden’s best-selling novel. Thus, the production realized early that it would have to build the hanamachi as an old-fashioned set.
The Sony Pictures production scouted locales in British Columbia, Hawaii, New Zealand and Australia before Marshall impressed upon his collaborators the importance of shooting in California. Not only did he feel that the best craftspeople for the job were there, but he also needed “a place where I could, in one day, go from the costume shop to the production-design shop to meetings with my cinematographer to rehearse with the actors.” In fact, “the requirements of the movie were more like a play,” producer Doug Wick says.
The filmmakers ended up building a huge set on an Arabian horse farm in Westlake Village called Ventura Farms. There, over a period of five months last year, a 4-acre, gently sloping hillside was levelled flat with bulldozers and excavators. In its place, they built a village that consisted of 43 buildings, a 200-foot-long river and three bridges, all of which production designers would weather through all four seasons and age three decades.
The other factor that made California the location choice was the state’s many Japanese gardens. The production filmed in such places as Huntington Gardens in San Marino; San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, which has a pagoda and pond; Saratoga’s Hakone Gardens, which has an authentic tea house and was designed by a Japanese emperor’s landscape architect; and Descanso Gardens in the Los Angeles suburb of La Canada, where the production diverted a stream and created hot springs.
“It would have cost millions to create these gardens, and they stood in for six or seven locations,” says location manager Mike Fantasia. No location was left unturned. Even Yamashiro restaurant in Hollywood, built in 1914 as a replica of a Japanese estate with an actual 600-year-old pagoda, was used in three scenes in the movie, including doubling as a geisha school.
With all of California’s beauty on display, preserving nature was the order of the day. Fantasia, who worked at the U.S. Forest Service, is known for his respect and protection of locations, and the production gained access to sensitive locations precisely because of his reputation.
At Ventura Farms, for example, there was a creek that ran by the set, and the production had several workers who did nothing but maintain it, using erosion fencing and sandbags. (The site itself was regraded, reseeded and irrigated so it looked exactly like it did before the “Geisha” crew arrived.) When the production shot at Moss Beach, Fantasia made sure hundreds of bales of hay were put on trails leading to the site so four-wheelers could take cast, crew and equipment to the shoot.
“It took a lot more time to get everything done this way, it took a lot more energy, it took a lot more money, but that’s what it took to shoot in these locations,” he says.