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Doyle's quest for perfection
Christopher Doyle is much like his multi-layered work ? full to the brim with surprise elements, says Saibal Chatterjee.
The mercurial personality of cinematographer Christopher Doyle is much like his multi-layered work - full to the brim with surprise elements. Take him at face value at your own peril: he hides within him nuances and possibilities that rarely, if ever, bubble up to the surface. Doyle the man has to be read as one would one of his rich film images - with patience and diligence - and savoured.
With his disheveled mop of hair and fidgety mannerisms, he comes across more like a mad scientist than a movie cameraman. His conversations are peppered with four-letter words. The refreshing directness of his language is as striking as his animated utterances, which stem from inspirational underpinnings. He constantly plays down his own achievements - "If I can do this, so can you," he tells a bunch of youngsters in New Delhi's India Habitat Centre - but loses no opportunity to assert that "Wong Kar-wai's films are my films too, what the hell!"
Indeed. The Hong Kong-based, Mandarin and French-speaking Doyle, 52, is cult figure in much of Asia. He is a creative artist of the highest order. The Sidneysider who left Australia when he was 18 has seen life from close quarters having travelled around the globe as a sailor and has brought his experiences to bear upon his cinematographic vision. Doyle has worked with filmmakers as diverse as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Wong Kar-wai, Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Gus Van Sant and Barry Levinson over the last two decades, leaving his imprint on every single frame, every fleeting on-screen moment.
His association with Wong represents one of the most fruitful creative partnerships that world cinema has ever seen. He first collaborated with the Hong Kong meister in 1991 on Days of Being Wild. The film set the benchmark for all of Doyle's future work with the director. "I chose the colour green to represent nostalgia," says Doyle, underscoring his impatience with anything that smacks of conventionality. Sepia is the tone that is usually associated with nostalgia, but Doyle has little belief in the tried and tested.
Doyle's freewheeling style complements Wong Kar-wai's flexible approach to filmmaking. As Wong works without a watertight script and in atmosphere of complete openness, Doyle is always free to experiment with colours, angles and movements in a manner that is in consonance with the setting of a particular sequence. "Wong's films are architectural. They are about space. Space is actually a character in his films," says the legendary cinematographer.
The Wong-Doyle association continues to this day, having yielded such acclaimed films as Chugking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, In the Mood for Love and 2046, which premiered at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival. Yet, Doyle still insists that whatever he has achieved is only a result of a process of constant trial and error. "You make mistakes," he says. "How you learn from them is crucial."
There are few cinematographers in the world who are quite as innovative as Doyle though. No one film of his looks remotely like another. His work is in a perennial state of flux, which is primarily what makes it so full of life, so exciting, so rewarding. His visuals are, in Doyle's own words, a blend of opposites - intimacy and distance, intensity and languor, subjectivity and objectivity, specific and the universal. It is the youthful vigour that he brings to bear upon every film that he does that sets him apart. But even more than that, his work constitutes a restless search for perfection. The fact that he still works with manic vigour is indicative of the fact that he is yet to reach the end of his quest.
Doyle's philosophy rests on self-doubt, on the acute awareness of the imperfections that inevitably creep into any human endeavour. "There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. The unexpected, the uncontrollable, the unavoidable and the mundane all impose themselves on the process of a work," he says. "Learning to appreciate, to make the cracks a positive part of how things get done is as important to the development of a work as it is to one's personal growth."
Says Doyle: "Age may not bring wisdom. It sure brings a lot more cracks. The films that are not perfect are the real reason to do more. The "one more" is inevitably cracked in some or another. So you do one more." Thank the heavens for the cracks - and the one and only Christopher Doyle who has got in through them like a shaft of glorious light.
