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Full of Eastern Promise An interview with Christopher Doyle
There is something of the maverick about cam- eraman Chris Doyle. Not just in his work, which has earned him a considerable reputation across the Asian filmmaking community, but also in his cheerfully subversive manner and exotic sound- ing history. Over the last decade or so, films such as Temptress Moon, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels and Happy Together have forged
the bluff, affable Australian an impressive repu-
tation. Reviews like “imaginative”, “magically
moody” and “lyrical” have been penned for his
work with Chinese master directors like Chen
Kaige and Wong Kar-Wei.
And word of his talents has spread further afield, with Hollywood taking notice. Recently he succumbed, and shot Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho and Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights. But for all the excitement of his Hollywood adven- ture, he continues to be based in Hong Kong.
“This is where my heart is,” he explains simply. “I was born in Sydney, but I left when I was 18 and have never been back to Australia. That was about 30 years ago. I was a sailor, I travelled and mis-spent most of my youth, and when I was about 30, I ended up studying Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
“I happened to be with people who were involved with theatre. Then moving from that into cinema, by a series of accidents, I just hap- pened to be in the right place at the right time. It was when Chinese cinema was beginning to happen, mainly because the people were start- ing to have an identity in this time of social change. I think it’s exactly what happened in France at the time of the New Wave, and what’s happening in Japan now. Somehow the energies are focused, and I just happened to be there in the eye of the storm.”
terms with it on our own level in terms of our commu- nication, and our rapport with wherever we happen to be. I always thought that cinematography was about that too, about translating those sorts of things into images. The great thing about film is that it’s word based, but it attempts to transcend that in order to bring us back to a common language.”
worked most interestingly with that stock. In Asia the light is different, and we have much more humidity, espe- cially in Hong Kong and the areas that I work in a lot. So a slightly pastelly, softer feel that certain Fuji stocks have really works. And it’s also cultural, it’s a question of what we’re used to looking at.
“ Fuji looks like a 19th century woodblock print. I’ve lived over here for a long time, and if you look at the printing in books and magazines for example, you can see that people are accus- tomed to a certain colour system. That’s why it’s more appealing to an Asian eye.”
Doyle’s mischievous nature and infectious good spirits will have come as a shock to the American crew on Psycho, but in the end he declares the experience to have been very sat- isfying, not unlike working with frequent collab- orator, director Wong Kar-Wei.
“At the first meeting we all introduced our- selves, and they came to me last. I said: ‘I’m Christopher Doyle - clown.’ That kind of changed the atmosphere, and I think that’s always been my role, to be the joker in the pack, especially in Hollywood. I was expecting to get fired every day so I didn’t take it too seriously, but I felt very responsible to the trust that Gus put in me.
“It was a soft landing for me really, I’ve done 30 films in Asia and have been approached to work all over the place for the last few years. But I was always scared. I think I was lucky that I never had a Hollywood dream, I always thought that Hollywood was rather crass, and mainstream filmmaking didn’t appeal to me. But you have to move on, there’s still a certain amount of craft to filmmaking and the place where most of the craft is being done is in Hollywood. That’s where you’d learn about it, that was my attitude so that’s what I did.
“I hesitated for a long, long time, because I think it’s been six years now that people have been offering me things, Spielberg and whoev- er else. I knew they would be wrong for my character and personality, but when Psycho came along I felt it wouldn’t have all the para-
phernalia and hype of the traditional Hollywood film. And it didn’t because we were very well protected by Gus, and in the end I was lucky because it became a very intimate experience.
“That’s what filmmaking is, a small group of people trying to do something together. You might have 2,000 extras and a $200 million budget, but basically it’s just about a small group of people trying to say something together, and actually trying to say something to each other. The rest is just bull, you know.” ■ Anwar Brett
Psycho, Temptress Moon, Happy Together, Chungking Express and Fallen Angels were originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Doyle’s transition into cinematography is,
the way he describes it, merely another happy accident. “I wanted to sleep with this actress,”
he states candidly, “and it worked too! I was
with this group of friends and we were all inter-
ested in films. We were doing theatre at the
time, and I had more time than most of them, so
the camera in my hand. It went from there. We happened to be with a group of people who had a certain energy, which again was a reflection of the frustration and the ambitions of youth. And we happened to be in Taiwan at a time when those frustrations and ambitions were start- ing to be voiced. Our voice was our camera.”
Being an outsider in the culture he has adopted as his own, Doyle has a particular perspective on Asia and Asian cinema, and sees a direct relationship with the process of his cultural assimilation and the art of cinematography.
“I’ve been a foreigner for 30 years,” he says, “but we’re all displaced in a certain way. We have to come to
The seamless transition from artistic inspiration to graphic image is all very well, but in filmmaking there are pol- itics to come to terms with. This was evident to Doyle par- ticularly on his American movie debut, Psycho, which was to be a shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock’s classic chiller.
“We tested seven stocks and just one Fuji stock,” he explains, “and the Fuji looked great. It wasn’t just me, even though I’ve shot a lot of Fuji in Asia. It was a shock to them, and it was a shock to me too. And it was like the House of un-American Activities - it was like I was on trial. It was like an affront to the American sensibility, doing something so un-American as choosing a non American stock. But in the end, Gus Van Sant, the art director and myself went with it because our colours looked best and
they put
Photo: a scene from Chungking Express (courtesy Moviestore Collection)
EXPOSURE • 14 & 15