Biography
Doyle was born in Sydney, Australia in 1952. In the late 1970s, he went to Taiwan from Hong Kong and then settled in Taipei. While living in Taipei, he studied Mandarin Chinese at the Taipei Language Institute. He worked as an oil driller in India, a cow herder in Israel, and a doctor of Chinese medicine in Thailand. In 1978, he worked as a photographer for the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre and Zuni Icosahedron. In 1983, he was a cinematographer for That Day, On the Beach, the feature debut of director Edward Yang. For that film, Doyle won the Best Cinematography Award in the 1983 Asia-Pacific Film Festival.
He has worked with major Chinese directors such as Zhang Yimou, Zhang Yuan and, most notably, Wong Kar-wai, for whom he contributed, wholly or partially, to the cinematography of all his movies from Days of Being Wild through to 2046.
He himself has directed a feature film, Away with Words (aka Kujaku, aka San tiao ren) set in Hong Kong and Okinawa, starring Tadanobu Asano and Mavis Hee, as well as a segment “Porte de Choisy” in the feature film Paris, je t’aime. Doyle is also a photographer.
While his Australian accent is still discernible when he speaks English, he does so with unusual intonations and stops, the result of speaking Cantonese and Mandarin, in which he is fluent, for most of his adult life. He also speaks fluent French. He lives in Hong Kong and his Chinese name is Du Ke Feng which means ‘like the wind.’
His music video credits include Six Days for DJ Shadow (directed by Wong Kar-wai), The Strokes’ Juicebox (directed by Michael Palmieri), Getaway by the Scottish group Texas (directed by Tim Royes) and Sigur Rós’ Gobbledigook (directed by Stefán Árni Þorgeirsson and Sigurður Kjartansson).
Read more about this topic: Christopher Doyle
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)