Christopher Doyle is proud of his hard-living reputation. But he has also shaped the look of world cinema, writes Donald Clarke
'I wanted to be the Bono or the Mick Jagger of film," Christopher Doyle cackles before dispatching another inch or two of lager. "But I ended up as the Keith Richards of cinema. Even Keith himself says that." The 51-year-old Australian, whose urgent, fluid photography has helped change the look of world cinema, certainly has some of the Stones guitarist's louche self-confidence. This is, perhaps, not surprising. Insofar as a director of photography could ever be called a star, that is what he is.
"Yeah, as a cinematographer who talks a lot and is often in bars and sometimes in the tabloids, I am able to bring some attention to the art of image making," he says. "I guess there are no other cinematographers whose local police force checks up to see if he's drunk. In Hong Kong, if the police see me on the street at 11 o'clock they shout: 'Not drunk yet, Chris?' "
Doyle has had the most singular of careers. Born in Sydney to parents of Irish stock, he broke into film at the age of 30 when, with next to no experience, he was asked to shoot That Day, On The Beach for the gifted Taiwan-based director Edward Yang. His energetic, spontaneous style was quickly in demand, but it was not until he did his first job for the Hong Kong maestro Wong Kar Wai, 1991's Days Of Being Wild, that critics began to talk about a Chris Doyle look.
Since then, in between working on Wong Kar Wai projects such as In The Mood For Love and the forthcoming 2046, he has found himself being lured back to Australia for Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence and inveigled towards Hollywood for Barry Levinson's Liberty Heights. And now it looks as if he may get to shoot in the land of his grandparents. The producer Liam O'Neill of Paradox Pictures has brought Doyle to Dublin for discussions about John Dawson's forthcoming satirical thriller, Dirty Rat.
"Aside from anything else he is a superb camera operator," O'Neill says. "He has a knack of identifying the emotional core of a scene and then spontaneously working outwards from there. Which is what we all should try to do."
Doyle is not one of those film makers who ate up cinema with their rusks. Growing up in a Catholic family where "the batteries in the camera would rust before the film got used up", he took most of his early artistic nourishment from literature. "Australia is a country with an enormous sense of possibility," he says. "But it is also a country that is totally empty: empty of ideas, of culture, of pollution."
Whether Doyle left his homeland to further cultural interests or flee the law is not entirely clear. In his characteristically speedy manner he tells a confusing story about stealing 35 books from a store and then getting caught crossing a state border with them. The incident, which also had something to do with drugs and the Queensland library, eventually led to his hopping aboard a ship and setting off for the rest of the world.
He worked as a well digger, a sailor and a cow herder before ending up in Taiwan, where he became one of the founding members of the Lanling Theatre Workshop. He began experimenting with movie cameras and went on to make the delightfully recherché documentary series Travelling Images, which brought him to the attention of Yang. How did his colleagues react to the hiring of an inexperienced foreigner with no formal training? "They all went on strike," he says. "I had just made a few personal films to get laid, really, and here I was. Eventually, they agreed to allow me to work if I had this guy shadowing me. After three days he went fishing, and we never saw him again."
Cinematography is supposed to require proper, grown-up training. It is an art and also, so we have been led to believe, a science. Whereas any idiot can direct a film, operating the camera, like flying a plane, is generally the preserve of highly qualified experts. "So many people in film come from an academic background, and they focus too much on the technical aspects," Doyle says. "But, you know, the technical aspects are actually very simple; you can get all that from a manual. But if you don't have any guts or any story to tell then you will get sucked up and used within a year. So my misspent youth is still a source of inspiration for me. I am still mining it."
It is reasonable to assume that no film school would have taught Doyle to work as he does. By all accounts he has a haphazard style on the set, and this shows through in the irregular, heterogeneous quality of his photography. The streets of Hong Kong and Taipei, with their frantic traffic and insistent neon, are transformed by Doyle into dreamy fantasies whose seductive power has made him arguably the most influential cinematographer in today's cinema.
Then again, you cannot imagine that any educational institution could have disciplined his whirlwind personality. A thin man with well-worn skin and ropy grey hair, he talks at an absurdly rapid pace and, if his greedy consumption of a mid-morning pint is any guide, drinks even quicker. He is clearly rather in love with his image as a boozy, womanising bohemian and relishes any opportunity to make blokeish noises about what he gets up to after dark.
"I always try to work with young directors, because they are in touch," he says. "And that's why I like sleeping with young Chinese women. Heh! Heh!" His phone rings. "Oh, it's my mother." His mother? But it must the middle of the night in Australia. "Did you think it was really my mother? No. It was, well . . . Heh! Heh!" He has, in fact, an extraordinary ability to bring sex into more or less everything. Like Swiss Toni on The Fast Show, he compares shooting film to making love to a beautiful woman. "The purpose of my art as a cameraman is the exchange of energy. It is really like good sex. When you have good sex you don't know who you are. You don't know if you are inside her or you are enveloping her."
Some profiles of Doyle have suggested that he must now feel like an honorary Asian. But, despite the fact that he has lived in the same Hong Kong flat for a decade, he is adamant that his true home is on the road.
Nonetheless, he admits that part of the attraction of coming to Ireland was the opportunity to connect with his roots. As we meet he is about to present a masterclass for Screen Training Ireland, after which he and Liam O'Neill will head up to Donegal to investigate locations for Dirty Rat (in which he also intends to take a speaking role). He feels that he properly connects with a country only when he is working there.
"I have worked everywhere," he says. "I just did my first totally Thai film, which is called Last Life In The Universe, and it was only through doing that film that I found the place that is now my Thailand. I think the same thing happened with Rabbit-Proof Fence. I knew Australia well, of course, and I had filmed in the desert often, but it was only then that I established a real rapport with the country."
That Doyle would choose to become involved with Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's fine Last Life In The Universe is no great surprise. An eccentric, luscious film, it offers many opportunities for the cinematographer to do what it is he does. His fans may be taken aback, however, by his decision to work with the sober petticoats 'n' primroses team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. How did he find himself cuddling up to the men behind A Room With A View and The Remains Of The Day? "It is a new film set in Shanghai. They realise I am mad, and they don't need to prove anything in their careers, so maybe now they need to disprove something. It is called The White Countess, which is a bar in Shanghai. So, obviously, they felt that as it is set in a bar I was the obvious choice."
Perhaps his involvement with the cosiest film makers in world cinema suggests he is about to settle down. He splutters a dirty laugh. "I was walking around the streets today, and I thought, even though thepubs shut so early, this is a place that could change me. But, unlike most people, I don't need security. I am most happy when I am staying in a hotel room with a swimming pool and flying on planes. That is why my films are the way they are, and that is why all this will never end. Or, if it does, it will end in a brothel in Nagasaki. I hope it does. Heh! Heh!"
