Jio MAMI Day 5: Cinematographer, director Christopher Doyle talks about all things visual

By Tanul Thakur You usually don’t need to book slots for a master class or a panel discussion at a film festival. These sessions are open to all; where attendees walk in at will and, often, walk out as well. The 4 pm masterclass at PVR Juhu yesterday was scheduled to run for two hours. — called Doyle C for Cinema — had to be pre-booked, like other features playing at the festival, as if implying this session was as entertaining and important as any other film. Christopher Doyle, filmmaker and cinematographer, who has shot some of the most visually stunning films of the last two decades, including Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love, Happy Together and Hero, is well known for his cinematographic ingenuity. Actors, directors or film professionals normally say the most correct and polite things about themselves and their peers in public. Doyle is not one of them. [caption id=“attachment_2494896” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Christopher Doyle. Image from Facebook.[/caption] Like a stone thrown into a pond, Doyle is known for creating ripples. In 2013, for instance, Doyle called the Academy Award winning Life of Pi “an insult to cinematography”, dismissed the initial portion of Lincoln, where the eponymous President is freeing the slaves, as “the most disgusting first three minutes of a film I’ve ever seen.” So given Doyle’s reputation, I didn’t know what to expect from this session. Wearing a beige kurta and loose lowers with Bengal prints, Doyle looked cheerful. For some strange reason, there was also a cricket bat nearby — would this go pretty weird, pretty soon, I wondered? But, more than anything, I wanted to know what Doyle would speak about, because you can’t really talk about a craft as intricate as cinematography in two hours. A few minutes later, Doyle laid out his plans for the next two hours: “PPP — personal, poetic and political”, motifs that informed his docu-fiction, Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled, Preoccupied, Preposterous, as well, which had screened just before this masterclass. However, the first few minutes of his talk were anything but a model of clarity. After venting out on the current state of cinema (“we are stuck between Harry Potter 75 and YouTube videos”) and showing a bunch of small videos, Doyle spoke at length about recreational drugs — how he and a few crewmembers once, working on a film, went for location scouting tripping on acid and the results were, what else but, disastrous. (The psychotropic hallucinogen had caused them to see a white wall filled with colours.) And then he suddenly thundered: “A film school is good only for your sex life. You can’t buy creativity, fuckers.” The crowd, which had been loudly cheering Doyle for nearly everything till then, broke into applause again. I began having second thoughts on enduring a two-hour long rambling monologue; moreover, Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart was playing in the next screen. I stayed put. The session changed its course soon, and it was brought about by Doyle’s life story, in form of text slapped on the visuals of an Orson Welles movie. Doyle was a late bloomer; he was directionless at an early age, having left “OZ [Australia] at the age of 19” due to “bad policies and bad drugs”. He then went on to study Chinese in a college in Taiwan. He didn’t begin shooting films till he turned 30. Taking cue from his own life, he then spoke about the balance between “objectivity and subjectivity”, the difference between “being totally immersed in something and then tracking back to see it” — a conundrum that artists around the world face everyday. Doyle wasn’t interested in launching into one-liners now, he was here to talk about his craft. “How do you film ‘frightfully distraught’?” He asked. “’James Bond takes a look at that bitch’ — how should that look on screen?” And then he spoke on behalf of all cinematographers: “We capture with images what words don’t.” The auditorium was silent. I secretly wished them to applaud. Doyle then began zooming in, talking about specifics. He spoke at length about how one of the most widely discussed shots in In the Mood for Love, where the camera observes and tracks the film’s two protagonists behind the window railings, came into being. Working with minimal resources (real location, modest budget), Doyle had to do with what he had, but those apparent restrictions challenged him enough to be inventive, to find his own way. “People often ask me, ‘Do you have a style?’” Doyle continued. “And I tell them, ‘I don’t have a style. I have a response.’” Doyle’s artist is a man of the moment, reacting to and alive in the present, not without an authorial voice, but one he’s only subconsciously aware of. According to Doyle, professionals working in big studio films “aren’t pushed enough”, citing his own example of that shot from In the Mood for Love, where limited resources drove him to create something memorable. “My friends work in those films to make ends meet,” he said. The question may well be “Why do you have to work with those assholes?” but in Doyle’s own words, “You don’t have to, but it’s a choice.” At some point later during the talk, he said, “You don’t really need to live the way I have lived. I am not telling you what to do”, and that was the ethos of this masterclass, too; you could make it whatever you wanted it to be — a rumination on life, work, movies, the finer joys of hallucinations, or just about anything. Tanul Thakur is a Mumbai-based film critic and journalist. He’s on Twitter as @Plebeian42 Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited is a venture of Reliance Industries, which owns Network18 (of which Firstpost is a part).