NEWSLETTER

INTERVIEW BY DAVID FEINBERG

Images courtesy of Christopher Doyle

Christopher Doyle, HKSC (aka ), is an Australian-born cinematographer who has lived and worked throughout Asia for more than two decades. He is most renowned for his eight-film collaboration with Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. On classic, largely unscripted films like Days of Being Wild, Happy Together, Chungking Express, and In the Mood for Love, Doyle helped create one of the most visually stylized bodies of work in cinema, all despite having never received any formal training whatsoever.

Upon leaving Australia at age 18, he had stints on a Norwegian cargo ship, as a cow herder in Israel, a well-digger in India, a doctor of Chinese medicine in Thailand, and many more... or so goes the legend of the man whom some call Dù KŠ Fēng, or “Like the Wind.” Drawing on his travels and many late nights spent in bars with artists and actors as his preparation, Doyle shot his first film in 1983 and has since enjoyed a long tenure as Asian cinema’s busiest Australian.

After the film 2046, which was released in 2004 and which took five years to complete, Doyle and Wong, despite admittedly being able to read each other’s thoughts, decided to have some time away from each other. Since then, Doyle has stayed busy working with directors around the world, most recently with Neil Jordan on Ondine and Jim Jarmusch on The Limits of Control. We talked to him from his Shanghai hotel room after a day of filming his latest project.

Vice: Hi Chris. You’re in Shanghai right now?
Christopher Doyle: Yeah, I’m in Shanghai and I’m staying on the 26th floor. It’s about 104 degrees here. These bloody fucking mosquitoes, I don’t know how they can fly this high.

What are you working on?
I’m working with Stanley Kwan, a wonderful, wonderful filmmaker. He’s a major Hong Kong-based director who tends to make quote-unquote “gay” or, as they might say in Hong Kong, “women-subject” films.

You’re known for being a very spontaneous presence on the sets of the films that you shoot, and for working without scripts on the films of Wong Kar-wai.
You can make incredibly meticulous notes, but when it comes to the actual shoot you still throw the script away. You have to. For me, it’s about the energy and the inspiration and the possibilities of what’s being attempted in the story. It’s kind of like sculpting. It’s getting rid of the stone to see what’s really inside it.

Like the legend of Michelangelo seeing David within the marble.
Yes. It’s a process that’s most basically motivated by a response to what is there. Maybe it comes from working in film communities that don’t have access to large budgets or that have minimal technical facilities. It’s part of being used to working with what you have as opposed to what you want. So, one gives and takes from it, as one does with tai chi, a basis of martial arts. Or one searches for the center of the whole as one does in meditation. You push in a direction and aim for a removal of the unnecessary.

That’s not the way most Hollywood cinematographers would talk about their work. It’s so refreshing to hear it spoken of this way.
I think that film has all the qualities of music. There’s repetition, there’s rhythm, which is a certain grace and a certain reserve at certain points. It has a spontaneous emotional energy, and it’s not stylized, it’s not, what’s the word…

It’s a bit like jazz, kind of improvisation-oriented?
Just like jazz. You start and then you have your solo stuff, you move along on certain themes, and then you all try to end up together. It really is a jam session. I think that’s wonderful. All art should aspire to that.

On all those great films directed by Wong Kar-wai, you also worked with William Chang as both the production designer and editor. Given the amount of footage you and Wong Kar-wai would shoot without a script on a film like In the Mood for Love, it seems like the hardest job was up to the poor editor. He had to piece it all together.
William is pretty ruthless! [laughs] That’s his great quality. It’s astonishing. When we work together, it’s in a very unspoken way. We don’t really discuss things. We don’t really have production meetings. It just happens. Again, I’m not being facetious, there’s just some common frequency with those guys. There is a communal response to something that actually is never articulated. Even when we go to a location, we don’t really talk. We just kind of walk through and decide if it’s good or bad and if we are going to go with it. Then, perhaps we come back and say, “How about that wallpaper?” or something like that. But that’s about it. It’s not like the Western sense of the production meeting, with various heads of departments sitting down to discuss something.

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Comments

Anonymous, on Oct 14, 2009 wrote: sweet as ow!

Anonymous, on Oct 2, 2009 wrote: that split image picture is awesome

Anonymous, on Sep 28, 2009 wrote: the blonde wigged lady is the best....

Anonymous, on Sep 28, 2009 wrote: chungking is a sick movie, they screened in my film class and i was in love.

Anonymous, on Sep 21, 2009 wrote: the stills from "Chungking Express" are hilarious. asian lady in a blonde wig?! ridiculous!