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"SHANGHAI \u2014 When we reach Christopher Doyle over Skype he\u2019s working at his Kowloon Bay studio. \u201CI don\u2019t know if it\u2019s a studio or a closet or a brothel or a repository of dreams \u2013 I\u2019m not sure exactly what it is,\u201D he cackles. \u201CI think it\u2019s a possibility, that\u2019s more or less what it\u2019s about. It\u2019s a living organism. It just keeps on evolving. Every time I try to clean it up I just make more stuff.\u201DDoyle, who\u2019s been described as the greatest living cinematographer, previously lived near the escalator in central Hong Kong, where he famously made \u201CChungking Express\u201D with director Wong Kar-wai. Their partnership is legendary, the two teaming up to make seven feature films starring Chinese cinematic royalty including Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Zhang Ziyi, and Leslie Cheung, who was recently made into a 1/6th scale figurine to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his death. Doyle says the doll \u201Cshould be ten times bigger than human scale like Leslie is.\u201DHong Kong\u2019s Central district is itself a star in many of these films, and it\u2019s with some reluctance that Doyle moved across the bay. Spending so much time abroad, however, he was unable to justify the steep rent, and he likes that the new studio is near the container ports. \u201CIt\u2019s back to my roots as a sailor,\u201D he says.Born in Sydney in 1952, Doyle left Australia as a teenager to join the Norwegian Merchant Marines. He washed up in Hong Kong, and later moved to Taiwan where he studied Mandarin and picked up the Chinese name Du Kefeng (\u675C\u53EF\u98CE) \u2013 Du after the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, and Kefeng, meaning \u2018like the wind\u2019. In 1983, he picked up the camera for Edward Yang\u2019s \u201CThat Day, On the Beach\u201D, for which he won the best cinematography prize at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival. It was only then that he went to France to study cinematography.Thirty years later, Doyle\u2019s filmography is as untidy as his studio, and likewise still evolving. From the Hong Kong art house cinema he grew famous for, he has since worked around the globe, with directors such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Gus van Sant, M. Night Shyamalan, and Jim Jarmusch. In 2011 he made both the pink musical, Shiniji Imaoka\u2019s \u201CUnderwater Love\u201D (\u201CIs the camera a cock, or an orifice?\u201D, Doyle asks us), and a 3-D teddy-bear horror, Takashi Shimizu\u2019s \u201CTormented\u201D.Doyle describes the experience of shooting in 3-D as \u201Chorrific\u201D. \u201CI think I made it too poetic. I think I\u2019m just not horror enough. I have horror enough in my pants,\u201D he cackles again, \u201CI don\u2019t need it in my life.\u201D\u201CTormented\u201D&amp;nbsp;Lately, Doyle has been in Beijing working on a film he can\u2019t yet talk about with his favourite new leading man, Ai Weiwei. \u201CAi Weiwei is the Tom Hanks of Chinese cinema,\u201D he says. \u201CAi Weiwei is so fucking beautiful on film because he\u2019s so solid, he doesn\u2019t give a shit. He is the great male star of the future of Chinese cinema. Please quote me. He\u2019s the George Clooney of the new wave. Once he sees [the footage] he\u2019ll either burn everything we ever shot or he\u2019ll embrace it.\u201D\u201CBeijing was great fun,\u201D he continues. \u201CI\u2019m not sure if he\u2019s pissed, but he fucking shaved my head.\u201D It\u2019s true that Doyle doesn\u2019t have his usual foppish flop of silver hair. \u201CI\u2019m not sure if he\u2019s saying fuck you for fucking me up or if he\u2019s saying it was a pleasure to work together, let me share something from my world.\u201DConstantly moving forward, Doyle shows us footage of his current project, which he\u2019s showing at literary festivals in Beijing and Shanghai this week. It\u2019s a split-screen unreliable documentary wherein Doyle presents a version of his life \u2013 \u201CI was conceived in the back of a Holden sedan\u201D \u2013 that\u2019s challenged by his Chinese counterpart, Du Kefeng, speaking Mandarin. \u201CDu Kefeng really takes the piss out of Christopher Doyle as the film goes on,\u201D Doyle says. \u201CFuck yeah. Who do you think you are? That\u2019s basically the rhythm. I\u2019m not sure we\u2019ve worked it out perfectly but it\u2019s been fun trying to demystify oneself.\u201DNamed \u201CAway With Words\u201D after the first feature film that he directed, Doyle says the performance will be about the relationship between words and images. Doyle is himself a prolific author. \u201CI\u2019ve done 14, 15 books and they\u2019re all out of print,\u201D he says, \u201Cand they\u2019re all extremely expensive on eBay and I wish I\u2019d kept hundreds of copies of them, but \u2013 ha! \u2013 I didn\u2019t.\u201DThat Doyle is still taking chances with experimental forms is a gust of fresh air after recent announcements from Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh that they\u2019d sooner bow out of cinema than risk diluting their filmographies with weaker new works. \u201CI love film to be challenged to do something that engages with a different generation who have had different visual experiences, and different life experiences of course, Doyle says.&amp;nbsp;\u201CIf we think we have something to say, let\u2019s fucking get out there and talk about it.\u201CWe should fuck up the system, we should fuck up the medium, we should be especially aggressive towards our own so called, you know, gao gao zai shang, how do you say that in English? Our so-called elevated stage, or elevated status. Fuck the elevated status. The kids out there, \u2018Gangnam Style\u2019 or whatever it\u2019s called \u2013 of course we have to compete with it, with integrity perhaps, but not with fucking arrogance, not with gao gao zai shang, not regarding yourself as a pinnacle of intellectual astuteness and visual acumen. No, come on.\u201CSo many people ask me very often, so, how do you engage with the digital medium. I say the kids are going to teach us. We\u2019re the students. The people who are on Youtube or engaging 24 hours of almost every day of their lives, who are online and having visual digital experience every day, they\u2019re the ones who are going to teach us.\u201DRegarding the end of his own career, he says,&amp;nbsp;\u201CI know I will die with either a camera in hand or a woman on top \u2013 what more could one ask of life ?\u201DChristopher Doyle speaks at Capital M in Beijing tonight at 7pm, and the Glamour Bar in Shanghai on March 10 at 5pm. Tickets 75RMB.Check in tomorrow for part two of our interview with Christopher Doyle, when he tells us why the \u201CLife of Pi\u201D Oscar is an insult to cinematography.Underwater Love A Pink Musical"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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