We chose to tell the story as a fable, set in a world as enticing and unattainable as Sayuri herself. Making the film was challenging, thrilling, sometimes frightening and always rewarding. My hope is that we have done justice to “Memoirs of a Geisha.”

I got excited about new ways to film the story, which I don't believe have been done before. I wanted to treat it as a piece of British realism rather than going with the picturesque tradition, which tends to depict an idealized version of English heritage as some kind of Heaven on Earth. I wanted to make ¬ìPride & Prejudice¬î real and gritty and be as honest as possible. Austen's characters are young people–Lizzie is 20, Darcy 28, Lydia 15. The emotions they experience are those of young people falling in love for the first time. I was moved by that and sought to convey it.

The dancing scene was absolutely hysterical. I am a terrible dancer myself. Daniel worked hard at absolutely everything, but it seems God did not necessarily mean for him to be a ballroom dancer. Daniel is absolutely his character Harry at that particular moment in the story.

I found the screenplay compelling. Loosely based on the graphic novel, Josh's Olson script is a Midwest American small town story. There was something classic about it without being imitative. I don't normally undertake family dramas, but I felt for the characters and the Stall family. It does have a powerful emotional resonance. A married couple with two kids are trying to live an open, straightforward honest life, and finding it difficult to do that. So I fell for that classical element.

We are the ultimate opposites when it comes to work and form, and it's therefore inspiring to collaborate. Lars is precise and systematic, almost mathematically exact, especially in the way he continues to experiment with film's form. I work more intuitively and searchingly, endeavouring to do what I can to create life and humanity on the screen. The thought of uniting these qualities in the same film was appealing, and when the opportunity arose, I basically said yes before I’d even read the screenplay. I have, since then, gone to the trouble of doing so.