From the lovesick policemen of ‘Chungking Express’ to the grimy streets of Argentina in ‘Happy Together’, the visceral, scriptless creations of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai have pushed the visual boundaries of filmmaking to new limits. Wong’s longtime collaborator, Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle, spoke to Hype about working for more than ten years with the legendary director.

‘In The Mood For Love’, Wong’s latest creation, sees a massive change in visual direction, forgoing the multiple film stocks and handheld action of previous films for a studied exploration of subtlety, finding meaning hidden in nuances of light and shade.

The film, set in 1960s Hong Kong, is the story of two neighbours (played by regular collaborator Tony Leung and the wonderful Maggie Cheung) who slowly come to realise that their respective partners (never seen on-screen) are having an affair. Desperate to make some sense of this, they act out the beginning stages of an affair themselves, to find out how it all started o but slowly, at least mentally, their own affair becomes consumed by repressed passion. Rich in period detail, particularly in such delights as Cheung’s collection of Cheongsam dresses, the films sees Wong and the team who have worked with him since ‘Days of Being Wild’ in 1990 make both a stunning and logical progression into a formality which would not normally become them. Yet still, at the centre, is a mischievous Australian cinematographer itching to play around.

“All films have a context, whether it be social, cinematic or monetary,” Doyle says. “We made this film this way because of where we were at the time we made it. The look of the film relates very much to our response to what and where we have come from.

“Whenever I got restless or impatient with the simplicity of what we were doing they [would] remind me: it’s not broken, so lets not fix it.”

Doyle, for his part, left the production before its completion, to be replaced by Mark Lee Ping-bin. Rather than a sign of acrimony with his friend, drinking partner and director Wong, it was a sign of his own increasing demand as one of the finest cinematographers in the business.

“I was on the film for 15 months and couldn’t hold off other commitments any longer,” he says. “Mark was not the only one to try to fill my empty shoes. [But] we are older if not wiser. We are more confident so we know when to let go. We hope each film will be different and a lot of bridges have been built over our water since we roughly made ‘Chungking Express’.”

For a cinematographer, used to drinking his way through loose, anarchic films with his buddies, Doyle could not have picked a stranger project to mark his entry into mainstream Hollywood: Gus Van Sant’s rigid, formal shot-for-shot remake of ‘Psycho’.

“I knew if I got to work more or less on time, didn’t drink too overtly on the set, knew who the producers were, and stayed away from the playback of the original I’d be fine,” he says. “All I had to do was get the film in the camera the colours on the screen. Gus was getting 20 million dollars for this ‘art project’ and it seemed that only he and I really knew. Our ePsycho’ is not a movie, it’s a conceptual art work put on film.”

Doyle left Australia as a teenager to spend his life wandering at large, spending time on a kibbutz in Israel, sailing with the Norwegian Merchant Marines, and passing himself off as a Chinese medicine doctor in Thailand. He is one of those Australians who left us so long ago that we can hardly claim him as our own, as much as we would like to, but for his next film he has returned to his homeland, to work on Philip Noyce’s eRabbit Proof Fence’.

“I would be lying if I claimed to be an Australian cinematographer,” he says. “I started in Asia and my heart is still there. But what I am in my world is very much informed by my Australianness. Hopefully I take the piss out of myself often enough to not get complacent or really believe all I say I am. Luckily I have this Chinese persona that leaves his awards in the boot of some girl’s car.

“We are what we make ourselves and our films are just a mirror of that,” he continues. “‘Rabbit’ is no more or less than a reckoning of where the people who made saw themselves at this time in this place. It’s not really my country anymore, but the issues are the same as the ones I live and hopefully deal with every day.”

Doyle did not go to film school or obtain any sort of formal film education o it was a happy accident that saw him first pick up a movie camera and set off down a new path in his rather full life. His disregard for eproper’ lighting and such technicalities as colour temperature and exposure may be his signature, but like all great work, it only happened that way because he didn’t know not to do it.

“I don’t think there is any difference between cooking and dancing and cinematography and a really good script, and a bad time as au pair in Yemen is what you need to get there,” he says. “It’s certainly more valid than Film 101 and even though I have some kind of script writing system in my computer, I avoid it in favour of salacious emails.

“At the end of the day you are your biggest critic and you only be where you should be when you really deserve to, and who can know when that is unless you try?”

Through all of his films with Wong, and his increasing global renown, Doyle has redefined many of the visual rules of filmmaking, capturing a reality far more real than what’s in front of us.

“Most of us have more visual experience in one hour on the World Wide Web than most critics or theorists have accumulated in all the courses they have taken and expound,” he says. “To trust our eyes was what the Impressionists taught us — not words, not equipment, money or conventions like blue moonlight. Look closer at the one you love and you’ll love better. Dance in light and smile in colour is what I said.”