“The cinematographer is the closest person to the actor. We are his or her first audience, so we have to be responsive, responsible, and a trusted confidante, because the more engaged we are, the more the audience will be engaged.”
One of the world’s most audacious and brilliant cinematographers, Christopher Doyle was born in 1952 in Australia, but has spent most of his professional life in Asia. Prior to his first DP job in 1983, he had worked as an oil driller, a cow herder, and a doctor of Chinese medicine, but it was his 8mm and video work that inspired Taiwan’s Edward Yang to hire him for his debut film That Day, on the Beach. Fluent in Mandarin, Doyle subsequently found himself a popular cinematographer in Hong Kong and China.
In 1990, he shot the second feature film from up-and-coming Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, Days of Being Wild, which began a collaboration between the two that included some of the most iconic Asian films of the next two decades: Chungking Express and Ashes of Time in 1994, Fallen Angels in 1995, Happy Together in 1997, In the Mood for Love in 2000, 2046 in 2004, and Wong Kar-wai’s segment of Eros—The Hand—in 2004. He also worked as cinematographer for Chen Kaige on Temptress Moon (1996), Zhang Yimou on Hero (2002), and Fruit Chan on Dumplings (2004), as well as producing Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards (1993).
As his fame spread, filmmakers around the world sought out Doyle to shoot their movies and he has worked with names as diverse as Gus Van Sant (Psycho and Paranoid Park), Jim Jarmusch (The Limits of Control), Barry Levinson (Liberty Heights), Phillip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Quiet American), M. Night Shyamalan (Lady in the Water), James Ivory (The White Countess) and Neil Jordan (Ondine). He has made films all over Asia including Last Life in the Universe and Invisible Waves with Pen-Ek Ratanaruang in Thailand. In 2011, he completed his first 3D production, Tormented, in Japan with Takashi Shimizu and the German/Japanese co-production Underwater Love, a “Pinkyu” genre musical. He wrote, directed, and shot his own feature Away with Words, set in Hong Kong and Japan, and directed and shot Warsaw Dark, a Polish production in Polish, despite it being a language he doesn’t speak. He has produced several books, including Why I Am Not a Painter and Picture Start.
