In conversation with Christopher Doyle, cinematographer of Wong Kar-Wai cinema: How we react to spaces energizes the film-Entertainment News , Firstpost

The New Yorker critic Anthony Lane described the cinematography of Christopher Doyle as “a snake — savouring the air of the streets.” Across the Atlantic Ocean, on BBC, he is credited with “changing the look of cinema”.

Doyle’s “anti-Hollywood” aesthetic, associated with the streaks of thick, luminous paint in Wong Kar-wai’s films, have a striking and lasting visual vitality. It has often been described as “post-modern” — though what that means exactly is everybody’s guess. My guess is the reliance, in his images, on feelings over narrative, on style over substance — the kind that skyrocketed post-World War II artists like Mark Rothko into fame. Rothko would just paint fields of colour, and people would stand and weep in front of his large, enveloping canvases. The effect of Doyle’s imagery is not much different. 

For all his artistry, Doyle is flippant, moony, and charming. During an e-mail exchange produced below, edited for length and clarity, Doyle warns, “I think you should take much of what I say with a pinch of salt. But I do hope the salt adds flavour to the dish.”

In the diary you maintained while shooting Happy Together, you wrote, “At first, [Wong Kar-wai and I] hesitated to repeat our ‘signature style,’ but eventually it was just too frustrating not to.” How would you describe this “signature style” that you and Kar-wai developed together?

Wong Kar-Wai has noted that “what we share together is what the film ultimately becomes.” It’s the open give-and-take of that process, or collaboration, the acceptance of mistakes, the time, energy, and often difficult choices that make the films out of the process, films that I hope you feel are as true and as personal as they are.

Happy Together has so much visual vitality. Can you tell me about the use of black-and-white in this film? How do you, then, get those rich blues, like the one of the sky when the men are on the terrace, or the deep reds of the slaughterhouse, or the bright yellows during the football games? In an interview, Kar-Wai mentioned black-and-white was used to capture the cold months in Argentina. Is that true?

If Wong Kar-Wai said it, it must be true [laughs]! I mostly see things in retrospect. Yes, winter in Argentina is bleak. But to me, even more importantly, it is where the “boys” are at which the black-and-white images convey best. We planned to make the opening scenes so desolate, so lonely. But the black-and-white look seemed so evocative that we just wanted to go on and on, to indulge in this melancholy. 

But as you note the film is also about hope and the give-and-take that is love. Our spaces, locations, and [production designer] William Chang’s textures are so rich, we had to find a way to move on to celebrate those elements. The black-and-white section should not become a gimmick or some fake artistic “ploy.” And as you will see in the film, it is used when there is an almost callous emotional shift in how the two men relate to each other. Thereon, we can get back to celebrating the real ups and downs of what they are going through.

Can you tell me what you remember about this shot from Happy Together? It is an iconic image, not just for its intimacy, its queerness, but for what it represented. The Paris Review even used it as the lead image for their article on “The Brief Idyll of Late-Nineties Wong Kar-Wai.” What can you tell us about it — the colouring, the composition, and the conditions in which you shot it?

I haven’t seen this image in many years. But now that you ask me to address it, what I see is two men lost in the garish light of a relationship they don’t know how to come to terms with. Touch me. Move with me. This is not a light of trust. I didn’t really ‘create’ the image or even think it through. The space, the light, the situation says it all. I feel in moments like this, the challenge [and the quality of director’s like Wong Kar-Wai’s work] is to know when to step back, and allow the characters to open their hearts, to let us feel loneliness, loss, need, and resolve. So it is what it is, and you see it as you need to. If it “speaks to you,” it speaks for all.

Wong Kar-wai often never worked with a finished script. How did that affect your leg-work and sense of preparation?

There are two things to do; make it simple, and make it consistent in light and composition, as you may have to come back to another variation of a scene months or even years after you shot it the first time. The second attitude, of course, is to ‘think on one’s feet’ to adapt quickly to changes in ideas or unexpected possibilities of light or climate or new ideas of how the characters interact or not.

As someone who helped establish the visual stamp, the reckless and fluid style of Wong Kar-wai, would you agree with someone like Curtis K Tsui who says, “In Wong’s case particularly, form is the essence of his films — it is, in many ways, the narrative of his work… It’s not a case of style over substance; rather, it’s style as substance?”

I am not an intellectual. I will take Curtis’s word for it.

There is mood, and there is emotion. These two ideas are separate but often confused for one another when talking about cinema. How do you, as a cinematographer — whose work is sumptuously moody, but can be too stylized to be emotional — tackle this difference?

Mood is light and colour, textures and surfaces given life. Emotion is the actors and director’s responsibility. If you think the mood gets in the way, don’t blame me.

What according to you is the role of symmetry in an image? You seem to actively distance yourself from it sometimes, and at others, you are intensely aware of it.

I found it very difficult working on Hero where Zhang Yimou insisted on a very formal aspect of image making — centering the image, having more screen space in the direction the actor was looking, and so on and so forth. But I have never been to film school, so who am I to know? I just follow what feels appropriate and wait for the director to say “Yes, yes…no! …. no!”

The sensual extravagance of being on a set can be too much. You have often said it is “emotionally exhausting.” Does it become easier over time? How do you replenish?

If it’s not exhausting, it’s not good sex. I want to be exhausted. I want to be [and colleagues have noted that I am] a ball of energy. I want to make the rest of the [always younger] crew to be ashamed not to keep up with old man Chris.

Anyone who works with their heart and true intent on a film must be exhausted; you are giving so much and responding so personally to the ups and downs of the process, to the emotional rollercoaster that the actors are going through, to the vagaries of the weather or the challenges of a location. Of course, it’s exhausting. Most of us are in great shape throughout filming because we will ourselves to be. And then almost all of us collapse, and absolutely need lots of rest the moment the film is done.

Have you had a chance to engage with Indian cinema? 

Aiaa [as we say in Chinese]… I can’t dance or sing. What would you want with me? Of course, I am joking, and yet not.

I lived in Bihar, near Hazaribagh for three years in my younger days. And have traveled most of the country. So India is in my blood. I feel great affinity for the challenge that young Indian filmmakers are making. I rarely see films, even my own films, but I hope younger writers and actors and producers are idealistic enough to want to give [what are you now?] more than a billion people their voice.

Your cinema, at least the films that you shot in Hong Kong, derived their energy from the city. About Chungking Express, you said “The energy of the city informed the energy of the film.” Over the past 20 years, the city has changed — gentrification, modernisation, the protests which you shot, and what have you. How has your style changed in response to the city?

Neil Jordan once asked me, “Why are all your films so different?” Actually, I never thought, and still don’t feel they are. They are just the life I have lived in spaces that have given image to ideas. Whether it’s Chile or Thailand, snowed-under Japan or the Australian desert, the space and how we react to that space is what energises a film.

Our duty and our honour is to respond to that space and its “QI” [energy], and to make work that celebrates people in their space. If Hong Kong has changed, we should celebrate and reflect that change, by adapting and working with the resources and the intent we have.

Sure, we did some interesting stuff. I feel we are looking for a new voice to respond to our new identities, our realities. It may take some time, but we will fight a good fight; we are not mercenaries.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a critic and journalist, who writes a weekly newsletter on culture, literature, and cinema at prathyush.substack.com.

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