Life Through A Lens

Christopher Doyle takes another hit from the cough mixture on our table.

Sitting in the lobby of Edinburgh’s Sheraton hotel, the legendary Wildman cinematographer is, frankly, looking the worse for wear.
“I’ve only had half a bottle but mixing it with vodka really works,” he nods sagely.
It’s no less than we’d expect from a man who once declared himself the Mick Jagger of lighting cameramen.
If anything, Mr. Doyle, whose appetite for wine and women is the stuff of industry lore, is selling himself short.
“What Chris shoots is beautiful because he’s always drunk behind the lens,” Wong Kar Wai, a frequent Doyle collaborator, once told me.
“If you hire me,” cackles Doyle. “You know exactly what you’re going to get.”
Quite unlike the sexagenarian rock star with whom he seeks comparison, Mr. Doyle has no clear rivals within his profession. The extraordinary stylist behind such gorgeous cinema as In The Mood For Love, 2046, and Rabbit-Proof Fence, the galaxy’s greatest lensman has most recently completed work on Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant’s Hitchcockian rhapsody to skater boys.
“I can’t skate for shit,” says Doyle. “It’s an interesting sub-culture to shoot. But ultimately I just make the bloody film and move on.”
An enigmatic murder mystery, like much of Christopher Doyle’s work, Paranoid Park’s dreamy aesthetic seems at odds with everything else about him.
Born in the drab suburbs of post-war Sydney during the ‘50s, Doyle is the eldest in a family of medics. But while his five sisters and brothers have all gone on to have sensible, important jobs as doctors, Christopher was always destined for a road less travelled.
In his teens he embarked upon a nomadic trek that would see him become a merchant sailor in Norway, a quack doctor in China, a cowboy in Israel and a well digger in the Indian desert.
His very international accent, a strange farrago of Dutch New Age and Australian vowels, bears witness to these youthful travels. But that rather more exotic sound coming through is not European but Asian in origin. A lifelong Orientalist, Mr. Doyle has spent most of his 55 years in the East, primarily in Hong Kong.
“I don’t know where it came from,” he tells me. “I liked Japanese literature as a kid. Though I didn’t know anything about China. I knew one Chinese person growing up. It’s very different now in Australia. I can’t remember the last time I saw a taxi driver there who wasn’t Chinese.”
A language enthusiast, he quickly embraced what he describes as ‘the uncertainties of Mandarin’. He soon enrolled at the University of Hong Kong, where, during the late seventies, his poetry teacher rechristened him Du Ke Feng (meaning “the wind overcomes.”)
“My Chinese name changed everything,” he says. “It has a great influence on expectations of me. My teacher was a pet and we kind of liked each other and she gave me this beautiful poetic name. When I started doing what I was doing and people didn’t know I wasn’t Chinese. They didn’t know I wasn’t beautiful and poetic until they’d see me.”
It was rather more complicated than that. When Du Ke Feng first went into cinematography at the behest of late director Edward Yang, it sparked protests across the Hong Kong film industry.
“They were totally up in arms,” says Doyle. “There were 26 cinematographers at that time and that was it as far as the industry was concerned. Everybody was cosy and contracted to studios. Everybody was asking why would you bring this guy in? It became a huge turning point for the industry. And it was Edward (Yang) saying ‘you’re all assholes’.”
Despite his place in Chinese film history, not to mention his groundbreaking cinematography, Mr. Doyle is remarkably blasé about his work.
“Somebody just happened to give me a camera at some point,” he shrugs. “And I messed about with it making little films and documentaries. I don’t understand the idea of cinematography being taught. I think it’s something you can just do.”
He is equally unenthusiastic about film.
“I never went to the cinema growing up,” he says. “Not really. It was just a dark place to get out of the sun and snog. There was never any ambition to work in film. It was an accident. I still don’t watch movies.”

Paranoid Park is on DVD from April 28