'I'd be Trumpian to deny what I am without Hong Kong': Christopher Doyle plots return

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'I'd be Trumpian to deny what I am without Hong Kong': Christopher Doyle plots return

By Robert Moran

Almost 50 years after he left for Hong Kong, where his revered films with director Wong Kar Wai helped define the city as a frenetic, romantic cosmopolis to Western audiences, enigmatic cinematographer Christopher Doyle is returning to Australia to make a new movie.

"Finally, finally, after all this time I'm coming home," Doyle, 68, says. "You can take the boy out of Cronulla, but you can't take Cronulla out of the boy."

Doyle on the set of his feature film, Hong Kong Trilogy, in 2014.

Doyle on the set of his feature film, Hong Kong Trilogy, in 2014.

The proposed film, a $6 million budget project with the working title Immunodeficiency and set to star Tilda Swinton and Japanese actor Joe Odagiri, will mark Doyle's directorial debut in Australia and will be the first Australian film he's shot since Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence in 2002.

"I know I have stuff to say about where I came from that I couldn't have said 50 years ago when I left," he says. "I'm coming back with a different set of eyes."

Doyle's return comes amid increased political instability in Hong Kong, an issue he tangentially touched on in his Hong Kong Trilogy, a 2015 doco released on the first anniversary of the Umbrella Movement, and collaborations with Chinese activist Ai Weiwei.

"What's happening with China and Hong Kong now means 2046 is a prophecy," he says of his 2004 semi-dystopian collaboration with Wong, whose title was a politically anxious reference to China's claim at the 1996 handover that it wouldn't interfere with Hong Kong for 50 years.

Zhang Ziyi in the film, 2046.

Zhang Ziyi in the film, 2046.

"We're 30 years away and the prophecy is already fulfilled, whether it's because of the virus or because of the political climate or because people's mentalities change," he says. "By the end of 2020, we were in 2046!"

If he's concerned, he's not showing it. It's about midday in Hong Kong when we Skype and Doyle's in his boxer shorts and a bathrobe, an IPA in hand. It's his own brew, I Drink Therefore I Am, ABV 7.6%, released online this weekend in cans with his own visage across the front.

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"Who needs an Oscar when you can have your own beer?" he laughs.

Hong Kong feels different, he admits. But he's adamant his homeward shift is temporary, a desire to explore his birth country with the same outside-in perspective he brought to his work in Hong Kong.

"This place has given me so much, I would be Trumpian to deny what I am without Hong Kong. Hong Kong has made me, I could never leave," he says. "But where I am and the people I've worked with have given me so much; I feel I should give something back to the place I was born."

Doyle hugs Wong Kar Wai at the Lumiere Festival in Lyon in 2017.

Doyle hugs Wong Kar Wai at the Lumiere Festival in Lyon in 2017.Credit: AP

He's also confident the enchanting, exuberant Hong Kong from his films with Wong - including Days of Being Wild (1991), Chungking Express (1994), and In The Mood for Love (2000) - is still there.

"Those films were not made by Wong Kar Wai and me, they were created by the energy of the people in this place at that period of history. Now unfortunately, as you probably know and especially the Australian press will tell you, it's gone. But I don't think so," he says. "I think we still have it and we're going to rework it in some way."

Christopher Doyle in the upcoming documentary, Like The Wind.

Christopher Doyle in the upcoming documentary, Like The Wind.Credit: Pinnacle Film Media

Co-written by Doyle and Chinese actress and poet Hei Wen, the upcoming Australian production is about a bee professor who comes to Australia and gets kidnapped by an obsessive young woman. It's being produced by Pinnacle Film Media and Scot Productions, and Hong Kong's PicaPica.

"It's about ecological issues. It's about bees. Ninety per cent of what we eat only exists because of bees," Doyle says. "And, of course, when the male drone f---s the queen, he dies. Hello, isn't that a metaphor? That's the real story! And they f--- in mid-air, which is fantastic."

Producer Ted McDonnell of Pinnacle Film Media - who made a documentary on Doyle titled Like The Wind (the English translation of Doyle's Mandarin name, Du Kefeng), which is set to premiere at June's Sydney Film Festival - says Doyle and his team explored locations across South Australia, Queensland, NSW and Victoria over a year ago. The COVID pandemic interrupted initial filming plans, but they hope to begin filming by the end of this year.

Doyle says "the film grew in South Australia, in the spaces we encountered" around Kangaroo Island and Lake Alexandrina.

"To me, all films are a celebration of people in space, the space is what informs the energy of the film. If we can celebrate that, so people can feel what a space can give to them, then I think we're okay. Because most people feel lost in space, the space they've been pushed into."

Doyle and Wong's Chungking Express.

Doyle and Wong's Chungking Express.

This week the Sydney Film Festival celebrates Doyle's iconic work with Wong in an 11-film retrospective, titled Love & Neon. The program was initially planned as part of last year's festival - tied to Criterion's 4K restoration of the films, and In The Mood for Love's 20th anniversary - but was bumped due to the COVID pandemic. Doyle isn't one for looking back.

"Every couple of weeks I get some film student asking me to give them insights for their thesis about Chungking Express. People are teaching my films and I just feel so… I feel like I should give them back their tuition fees," he laughs. "I mean, what are you wasting your money and time on?"

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But he believes the open, adventurous spirit in which the films were created offers some enduring relevance.

"I hope people can understand we were looking for something; we were looking for, as Tom Waits says, 'the heart of Saturday night'," he says. "Meaning that after all the horrible, mundane pressures of the nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday week, that perhaps these films bring relief or pleasure and celebrate what matters and what is possible.

"This is the beauty of the Wong Kar Wai mind; he's a romantic. He really wants us to live better than we do," says Doyle. "That's why style is so obvious in our films, why colour and light are not always naturalistic, and why the costumes are astonishing - it's a celebration of the possibility of life. That's why I think they're extraordinarily relevant because, especially now, we really need to find the heart of Saturday night."

Love & Neon: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai opens in Sydney on Saturday, and in Melbourne on February 11.

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