Profile: Christopher Doyle

By Chris Hyde

November 26, 2002

Damn, but that Steve Martin *is* a dirty rotten scoundrel.

There are many reasons to be anxiously awaiting the coming wider release of The Quiet American. There’s the powerhouse Graham Greene source material, a Christopher Hampton screenplay, and the always-watchable Michael Caine. But there’s yet another justification for desperately wanting this film to open beyond its paltry two-week NY/LA Oscar-eligible run: the chief cameraman for the project was the great Christopher Doyle, one of the best cinematographers working in film today.

Born in Australia in 1952, Doyle spent an itinerant early life that included shipping out as a sailor, cow herding and traveling to India and Thailand, among other places. He attended university in Hong Kong in the 1970s, but it was later when he moved to Taiwan that the future course of his life was to take shape. While involved in theater there he was to meet filmmakers such as Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang, and the latter director was to get Doyle his start in the movies when he asked him to shoot his debut film, Haitan de Yitian (That Day at the Beach) in 1981. Following this, he shot a single French film (Noir et Blanc) prior to settling back in Hong Kong, where in 1991 he would find the prime collaborators with whom he would go on to make some six films in the next decade.

The team being referred to here consists of director Wong Kar-Wai and production designer William Chang. Their initial project was the 1991 A Fei Jing Juen (Days Of Being Wild), which would net all three Golden Horse awards in their respective categories at that year’s annual ceremony honoring the best films from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The film did lose out on the Best Picture nod to Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day, but their teamwork was solidified with his first successful venture and they would continue to work together as a unit over the following years.

Their run in that time would total such excellent works as Fallen Angels, Chungking Express, Ashes of Time and Happy Together. The group’s most recent collaborative project, In the Mood For Love, shows off his amazing skill in its highest form as he shoots Tony Leung and the incomparable Maggie Cheung--for whom Doyle’s camera always has had a special affinity--awash in pop neon shades and lit with seductive softness. (It should be noted that also working on this film was the equally brilliant cinematographer Mark Ping-Bin Lee, renowned for his work with Hou Hsiao-Hsien). The camerawork put in here is simply dazzling; a shimmering fragmentation dissects the onscreen characters, tearing them apart in luminous color as their passion itself is rent. Not surprisingly, Doyle and Lee shared a Golden Horse award for the cinematography of this spectacular film.

However, while his international reputation was certainly built on the work he did with Chang and Kar-Wai over the last decade or so, Christopher Doyle has also shown his talent in many other films in that time. He has worked for Chen Kaige, Chen Kuo-Fu and Peter Chan, going so far as to take an acting part in the latter’s Comrades: Also a Love Story. There’s now a Korean film on his resume, as he shot the 1997 Love Hotel for Ki-Young Park, and he has even tried his hand at directing with the 1999 Asian production San Tiao Ren (Away With Words). Additionally, with his work garnering more international attention, he has come west to Hollywood to sit behind the camera.

In his first foray here, Doyle delivered the color photography that is one of the few reasons to see the recent and unnecessary Psycho remake, and then followed this with cinematography on Barry Levinson’s Liberty Heights. He worked on Jon Favreau’s Made in 2001, then Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence, and will be teaming with this director again for the aforementioned soon-to-come The Quiet American. However this recent work for the domestic US film market in no way means that the cinematographer will be turning his back on his beloved Asia; Zhang Yimou’s breathlessly awaited Chinese blockbuster Hero will bear the imprint of the man’s fascinating camerawork.

Doyle’s emphatic style encompasses a range of filmic techniques to convey its impression. Cameras are sometimes handheld, with short lenses fitting tightly on the characters in the frame, but there may also be plenty of fluid panning or gliding if the situation calls for it. The compositions in his work for Wong Kar-wai especially seem cropped, edited from the world in a way that exudes a sort of spontaneous modernism. But what is nearly always most striking about Doyle’s camerawork is the suffusion of color that he brings to a scene; there’s a visual saturation of hues given that seems to glow with its own inner light. Sometimes, as with In the Mood For Love, the scenes are optically printed to enhance the way they appear, but this only serves to enhance the underlying fresh shades of vision that the cameraman’s natural flair brings in the course of his stunning work.

The films that Christopher Doyle shot in Asia for Wong Kar-Wai and others over the course of the last 20 years have helped to define onscreen a particular style that has now come to both reflect and represent an emerging modern sensibility in that part of the world. It is fitting that he has been chosen to participate in the creation of the new Chinese superstar production Hero; his contribution to the way in which the international film community perceives modern Hong Kong remains unparalleled, and so to allow him to bring the Mainland to the world as well just seems right. It should also be hoped that he continues to turn in work for Hollywood, as Doyle’s greatness as a cameraman deserves the attention of the wider audiences available in that capacity, and the films that he works on can only gain from the association. Perhaps sometime in the future he’ll even gain the Oscar for Best Cinematography, which would be just recognition given that there are few active in the field today that are his equal.

     


 
 

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