When it was announced that in three days' time Christopher Doyle would be in town to hold a masterclass (at Edinburgh 2004), tickets sold very quickly indeed.
Waiting beforehand with the cognoscenti crowd of producers, directors and cinematographers, I saw a dishevelled figure with absorbing eyes and a weathered face lope across the lobby. This, it turned out, was Doyle. Clutching a crate of beers, he swung onto the stage with Festival Director Shane Danielsen, whose task it was to interview him. No sooner sat than standing, Doyle rarely stayed in one place physically or topically, though his emotional and intellectual drive remained rather more constant. A lesser interviewer might have been stumped, but Doyle was kept in just enough order to bring out some of the fascinating points he had to make. Occasionally Danielsen would have to bring him to heel by wryly ordering him to sit down or answer a question. This seemed to be effective treatment for Doyle, who admitted that he relied on the people he worked with being strong enough to pull against him.
Danielsen started by asking about Doyle's past, growing up in Australia. Doyle swept past that, pausing to mention leaving at 18 and the burning down of his father's house, though he did say that the space of Australia ("you can never encompass it") was the "space of dreams" and that the challenge of "how to make it my sky, our sky" was one he was still grappling with.
Having left Australia, Doyle entered the world he has made home - south-east Asia. After "a wasted youth" and a few trips to jail - "the usual thing, you know" - he started his film career at the tender age of 34. What a career it has turned out to be. Wong kar-wai's favoured cinematographer since Chungking Express in 1994, Doyle has also shot films as varied as In The Mood For Love, Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Quiet American, the remake of Psycho (without seeing the original) and a host of south-east Asian features, including the first ten days of Infernal Affairs.
"Film is between intimacy and dream", said Doyle, elaborating later that it was "between the familiar and the dream". So his efforts to make the sky of Australia his - most directly in Rabbit-Proof Fence - are efforts to bridge what he already comprehends with what he wants to comprehend. "My best film is my next film" he said, grinning at this commonplace saying which was nevertheless wholly credible given his constant state of flux. To stay in flux is to stay responsive in Doyle's eyes, to respond to a space: "Space informs films much more than is acknowledged".
It is not therefore the case that Doyle seeks to control as much as possible, but rather that each day's work is "the best you could all do, at the time", and that each project "has to be about the people". Part of this responsiveness is to work as the whim takes him. He is certainly not tortured by a concept of art as something that comes from within. "You pay me and I do what you want", he said with a shy smile. By this point it was hard to imagine Doyle doing anything that somebody else wanted. The only way to apply auteur theory to the industry after hearing Doyle speak is to apply it to the man himself, something he would refute; something he doesn't take himself seriously enough for. He did point out that he would sometimes work with someone who had "500 pages of notes" and then would be working with Wong kar-wai where "and nobody really believes this, but there is no script".
Doyle played a DVD piece of his own devising, part of which featured Feng interviewing Doyle. "Installations are bad movies played slowly", asserted Doyle, seemingly unaware that his own piece was rather like a bad installation played slowly. Words such as "enthusiasm" and "focus" drifted up out of a swirling blue Photoshop-esque background and then disappeared, unlike the focus and enthusiasm of Doyle himself. Part of his DVD was clips from films he has shot, at which rapt attention was inevitably focussed on the beauty of In the Mood for Love and on the briefly alluring but inconclusive glimpses of 2046. Doyle said that the film might be ready in time for the Beijing Olympics and Danielsen added caustically that none of the snippets were in the cut he'd seen at Cannes. Doyle refused to comment on the film when pressed by Danielsen, a decision Danielsen said he respected.
"I still don't know what I'm looking for", said Doyle. Some would argue he's found plenty. He is refreshingly full of hope for the future. He did not, as such a master of painting with 35mm might be expected to, dismiss High Definition. He believes "somebody else is going to take us somewhere [with it] - a medium finds its own voice and you can't compare that [with another medium]". Even more refreshingly, he thinks we are poised at a point of visual sophistication and technical quality not seen since the end of the silent era. What will he find next in this apparent golden age? Whatever it is, it will be worth watching.
Richard Dilks |
