Hong Kong filmmaker aims high
NEW YORK -- At first glance, there isn't anything vaguely Asian about Christopher Doyle: He towers over most people, sporting a gnarled ponytail of graying brown. Hazy blue eyes peer from a soulful face weathered by sunshine and hard living. He sports the remnants of an Australian accent diluted by decades spent away.
But by most accounts, Doyle is an Asian filmmaker, one who has a Chinese name, address, and sensitivity, and who is as embraced by his adopted continent as he is unwilling to leave. "In Hong Kong they used to call me Australian-born, but now they just say Du Kefong," says the cinematographer, using the name his Chinese teacher chose for him. "It's a very poetic name," he adds, speaking from the lounge of New York City's Soho Grand Hotel during the Tribeca Film Festival. "You hear that name and you think, `He must be a Manchurian prince.' "
Doyle doesn't downplay his acclaim, earned through collaborations with Wong Kar-Wai and other filmmakers from Asia and elsewhere. "I like it when they ask me in customs what my next movie is," he says. "There is a pleasure."
It's a gratifying response to the celebrity that so rarely characterizes people behind the lens, with the exception of top directors or producers. Doyle is neither, but he has the clout of a Hollywood mogul. "I'm very proud that part of the reason some films get made is because my name is involved. And because of my name, people pay attention to the visual part of the film. You think that maybe this will be a different experience than a James Bond film."
Boston audiences now get to have three such experiences -- all with vastly different looks. "Last Life in the Universe," a Thai film that just finished a weeklong run at the Brattle Theatre, is gentle, contemplative, and erratic. Zhang Yimou's long-awaited "Hero," a martial arts epic as bold and modern as it is stunning, opened Friday. And Sept. 17 marks the release of "Infernal Affairs," a quirkily stylistic Hong Kong cop flick for which Doyle created the look and partially shot.
There's no question about Doyle's range: He is as responsible for the frenzied existentialism of Wong's "Chungking Express" as he is for the richly composed Vietnam in Philip Noyce's "The Quiet American" and the sweltering, nuanced seduction in the movie he's perhaps best known for: Wong's "In the Mood for Love." But a single element ties his oeuvre together: hyperawareness of space.
Indeed, Doyle's approach to space gives new meaning to the phrase "location, location, location" -- everything he shoots is a tailored response to a wall, a city, a house, a sunrise. Although cinematography is highly technical, with the cinematographer, or "D.P." (director of photography), responsible for lighting and electrical functions and everything having to do with the camera, Doyle says that technicalities take a back seat when he works. Certainly, he agrees, "every shot is filtered through criteria -- whether it be your experience or your eye or the needs of the sequence. But I don't like to articulate that too much because it confuses the kids; they think it's an academic procedure -- and it's not."
Testament to the cinematographer's flair: The context and the visual style of "In the Mood for Love," a movie about a sublimated affair in 1960s Hong Kong, are one and the same. The camera pans coolly past doorways, peeking through mesh screens and beaded curtains, so as not to intrude. It avoids eye contact, lingering instead on profiles and napes of necks and sidelong gazes. Yet voyeurism abounds: The lens hovers in close vicinity to Maggie Cheung's tightly clad waist and hips, giving her sultry once-overs. Smoke, fervently fetishized, represents isolation, or transcendence. Used like this, the camera is the visionary's best tool -- and the viewers' closest surrogate.
Doyle himself, 52, is freewheeling and energetic, with a youthful manner and a butterfly's attention span. He calls himself shy. But during a follow-up interview after a screening in New York, he jokes with and flits among half a dozen friends, 20- and 30-something New Yorkers. He steps into a sushi restaurant, insists on a beer to down with his sake, and invites the interviewer to join him in the melee.
So much the better then to understand his union with Wong, who improvises all his story lines. "He'll say, `Yeah, let's shoot from here. This feels good,' " says the cinematographer. Wong's sentiments in a 2001 interview were clear: "I can rely on Chris for the framing, the lighting. I don't have to pay too much attention because he knows what I want."
As for who's in charge, it's an open question: The cinematographer's reputation is for being commanding in his realm. Interviewed separately in the Soho Grand, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang, the director of "Last Life" and 2001's "Transistor Love Story," says that the most important thing Doyle taught him was to relinquish jurisdiction.
"When I worked with him," says Ratanaruang, "I was quite loose with what I wanted. I let him do whatever, unless I discovered that something didn't work. If it were some of my earlier films, I wouldn't have been able to do that."
What resulted is a lyrical, sensitive pas de deux between two residents of Bangkok: a suicidal former yakuza and the Thai sister of his dead crush. The movie, similar in tone to "In the Mood for Love," takes place largely within her house ("the third character," says location-conscious Doyle).
Another result: a second film in the works, to be shot in Phuket.
Doyle gets jobs like this all the time. Says Ratanaruang of their Asian connection, "It's like a family of film people, and everyone's really nice." Mid-interview, Doyle takes a phone call, which turns out to be from the iconic American indie director Jim Jarmusch. They talk. It sounds like a consultation.
Doyle's next shoot will take place in Shanghai, where he'll be working with the legendary Merchant Ivory team. When asked what other directors he'd like to work with, he doesn't hesitate. "Everyone," he says. "For me, it really is all about the people." But he thinks about it and takes the enthusiasm down a notch. "It's got to work at the artistic level," he says. "It's not a career move."
"Hero" may not have been a so-called career move either, but it will shift Doyle closer to being a household name in the US. It's hard to believe that Asia's most celebrated cinematographer hadn't worked with Zhang, the world's best-known cinematographer-turned-director, sooner. But when the time came, Doyle says, there was no turning back. "If someone like Zhang Yimou invites you to make a movie with him, you should be very scared and intimidated, or honored."
Their collaboration developed a unique approach. Addressing the attempted assassination of China's first emperor, "Hero" color-codes the various story lines -- yielding brilliant visions in fiery red, stonewashed blue, white, lime green.
"We wanted to see how far we could push it," says Doyle. "People use metaphors, but they don't go very far."
Cameras were not a big part of Doyle's childhood. "In our family there are only five or six pictures of me as a kid," he says. "The film would rot and the batteries would melt the casing before we developed any of it."
He went on to study literature at Sydney University but left school -- and Australia -- at 18. He began traveling the world, dabbling in jobs, farming on a kibbutz in Israel, sailing as a merchant marine, and administering Chinese medicine -- without training. In China, someone asked him for help with a documentary and handed him a camera.
The cinematographer considers his late start an asset. "The real work of filmmaking is living," he ruminates. "Whether it's your life or the history of cinema or even the stock market or how you cook. It comes from what came before it, how you've lived up to now. Whether it's delayed or an accumulation, it's a living thing."
Doyle's abandoned studies in literature aren't forgotten. "Language is basic to my cinematography," he says. "Camerawork is a response to words."
Asked if he has any regrets, Doyle names the obvious. "I didn't do `Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' because I was doing `In the Mood for Love.' Ang [Lee] and I have known each other for years. Probably if I shot it, he wouldn't have gotten an Oscar -- honestly. We all know it would have been a very different film if I had shot it."
Lately, he's begun to keep a written and photographic journal of his films. After all, he says, cast and crew are my family.
It's a lonely life at the top, says Doyle, full of "empty beds and lonely rooms. I sit there looking at the wallpaper hoping for inspiration." There is humor behind the words, but his next statements are a little more intense. "I want you to love me. I want to make you happy. I want to be the best." Jean Tang can be reached at jeandelinstang@yahoo.com.
