It was love at first sight. When Robin Swicord began reading Memoirs of a Geisha for the first time, she was swept off her feet. "I read it as soon as it came out and fell into it like a deep pool," the screenwriter told me, one hazy December afternoon in a café near her Santa Monica home. The vivid intensity of this initial encounter with the novel - the first of many - caused her to lose all sense of place. "When I looked up from the page," she recalls, "I felt disorientated because I wasn't in Japan."
As for so many other readers across the world, reading Arthur Golden's arresting tale of geisha life in the first half of the 20th century - half romance, half cultural history - clearly left an indelible stamp on Swicord. Professionally, too, its influence will long be felt, for the book presented her with what has turned out to be the most prestigious project of her career so far, propelling her into the vanguard of this season's Oscar race.
By the time Golden's novel came out in 1997 Swicord was already well on the way to establishing herself as a Hollywood adaptation specialist. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, she had studied English and theatre at Florida State University and written off-Broadway plays before MGM lured her to Los Angeles in 1980 to do rewrites. There she racked up a high-profile credits roster that included Little Women, starring Winona Ryder and Susan Sarandon, The Perez Family for Mira Nair, and Roald Dahl's Matilda, which she co-wrote with her husband Nicholas Kazan, the son of Elia Kazan. Practical Magic, which she also wrote and which starred Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock, would open at number one in North America in 1998.
But Memoirs of a Geisha was something new, a layered and complex saga that offered a shimmering opportunity, albeit one that presented significant challenges. "When I first read the book I didn't immediately think somebody should make a movie out of it," she says. Nor did she necessarily consider it a possibility. When her friend Amy Pascal, now head of Sony's motion picture group, said that she'd bought the rights for the studio, Swicord remembers her worried reaction: "Oh God, I hope they do a good job of it."
Making movies in Hollywood can be a notoriously sluggish affair, and in the ensuing years Swicord monitored Geisha's tortoiselike progress through the studio. At one point Steven Spielberg was in line to direct, but when he opted for a producing role and Rob Marshall stepped in, Swicord made her move. "I thought Chicago was fabulous and had been eager to meet Rob. I managed to get a meeting and we talked in very general terms about Geisha's overall shape. I saw it as an antebellum novel - it reminded me of Gone With The Wind with its story of this secretive world and unique culture that closes up when war comes. We discussed the films of David Lean - Oliver Twist and Pygmalion - and we both saw this as an epic."
The pair clicked and met a second time before the producers called Swicord to say the job was hers. She threw herself into an intense period of research punctuated by a trip to Kyoto, which she had first heard about from her father, who served in the US navy in Korea when Swicord was born, and where the geisha district or hanamachi was situated in the novel. She began collaborating with Marshall on the screenplay in early 2004. "There's no way to do a film as sprawling and exotic as this without it becoming a kind of obsession. The intensity meant I was working all day and many nights and more than once I went two or three days without sleeping. It's strange for it to be over and done now - I feel both bereaved and bereft." Each day, Swicord would hole up in a room at the back of her house and tap away. "Writing comes after a fairly rigorous process of outlining and structuring, which allows me to go into freefall when I start because I know I have somewhere to land. I'm so fortunate: I get to read and write stories and play-act and I don't even have to change out of my pyjamas!
"I've never worked so closely with a director before. I would hand Rob a big chunk of pages and he would read them and suggest changes. It's a very hands-on approach, which I enjoyed because our vision was so closely aligned. I truly think he could be a genius - he understands movement, music, visuals, drama, and he has enormous skills and is a natural leader. Howard Gardner talks about the seven intelligences and Rob has them all. He was also very open about his process and I think that's the dancer in him: he was unafraid to take a mis-step. After years of paying his dues in musicals he's developed this way - he's fearless. There are a lot of really talented people who are slightly encumbered by fragile egos, and sometimes it's hard to work with that because there's no room to play."
Golden's book is characterised by streams of inner thought and was never going to be a straightforward adaptation. Fortunately the author was on hand to help. "Adapting is always an interpretive work," Swicord says. "Some parts are original, but you're always in service and collaboration with the author. This book was written in the first person, has a long, interior, ruminative monologue and moves around a lot in time. So I had to create a chronology. There's so much complex detail about the life of the geisha and the village that would have slowed down the story on the screen. This is by necessity a distillation. Arthur was very generous and brought us his own research notes and materials, including his unedited manuscript, which was invaluable. He was supportive when we departed from the text and didn't have that reflexive, protective instinct. When it was all done and we were at the press junket he came up to us and thanked us.
"I connected with the story of the little girl who loses her family and is sold into indentured servitude. Even though the people she lives with treat her harshly and never show any kindness, she holds on to something that she's always been moving towards - this idea of herself as a person who deserves to be loved and to love in return." Swicord was careful to retain the novel's elemental imagery, particularly as a way of delineating the central character Sayuri (played by Ziyi Zhang from House of Flying Daggers and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) from her rival Hatsumomo (played by another giant of Chinese cinema, Gong Li). In the novel Sayuri is associated with water while the other woman is represented by fire, and Swicord played this up. "Sayuri's strength was in her fluidity, whereas the first time we see Hatsumomo in the film she's flinting, which is a gesture of good luck in Japan and introduces her through fire."
In one significant departure from the book, the villagers don't light giant pyres in the surrounding hills in an ancient ritual honouring their ancestors. Instead there is a blaze inside one of the houses where the geishas reside. "It would have been too expensive to stage a huge fire in the hills and besides, you're not allowed to set fire to the Ventura Hills!" she says, referring to the California countryside where most of Geisha was shot beneath a massive silk screen to mask the sun and recreate the misty atmospherics of Japan.
Two weeks after we met, Swicord won the International Press Academy's Golden Satellite award for best-adapted screenplay, which bolsters her chances for lifting one of the coveted statuettes at the Oscars this spring. But the mother of two is nothing if not humble and would prefer to focus on what she does best. "I'm lucky to do what I do," she says. "As soon as I understood that books were written, that was the moment I picked up a pencil and began writing. I was the kid who spent the summers writing little novels. I was the nerdy bookworm. When I met the stars of Geisha [including Michelle Yeoh, Zhang's co-star from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon] I was blown away - you can feel that star power coming out of them."
Hollywood surrenders to awards punditry in December, when newspaper and magazines are awash with speculation on who will lift the famous gold statuettes come spring. Swicord is currently lining up several directing projects based on her own screenplays, including the sweeping Ireland-set family epic The Mermaids Singing, which has Jessica Lange and rising US star Evan Rachel Wood attached. Also on the books is The Jane Prize, which centres on a family of Jane Austen scholars in New England. That old Hollywood inertia means it may take a while before these projects come to fruition. An adapted screenplay Academy Award nomination, let alone a win, will most likely change all that.
· Memoirs of a Geisha opens in the UK this Friday.