By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Chris Doyle: This is my Macau… my New York… this is how Phuket feels to me
Bangkok Post’s Kong Rithdee hoists a couple more with DoP Christopher Doyle as Pen-ek Ratanaruang‘s Invisible Waves opens the Bangkok International Film Festival. “Such visions comes from a mad-haired Aussie who speaks fluent Chinese, a genius goblin with a gush of energy bordering on drunken mania. Doyle is famous for quaffing Oktoberfest quantities of Heineken on set, and for inspecting the discotheques of the world’s various cities… 
When he speaks, what comes out is a heady mix of prophetic lucidity and riotous incoherence… “What’s important is the way Pen-ek and I collaborate. Once the script was ready to a certain level, we went to visit the locations, and we reworked the script based on our visits – what if we took this in or took this out. This way the script became more intimately related to the spaces. So the cinematography came in much more closer to the work.” Unlike the rapt sensuality Doyle gave to some of his most famous works, Waves acquires a surreal power from its mouldy look; every scene looks as if fresh air has been sucked out through the windows and only a remnant of luminous staleness remains. The scenes on the cruise ship – shot in a Bangkok studio – are a meditation on space as the character roams the labyrinth of his own consciousness… “I mean, if you do try to go there, to push towards it, you’ll find something that you wouldn’t have found if you say ‘oh no, it’s not what I want, what am I gonna do?’ For me, the idea is: just go there. If you are a filmmaker with an identity, or with a vision of how life is, you can overcome this kind of difficulty, or you can make it part of your style. This is something I learned from working with Wong Kar-wai – that you take what you have and make something more.”… Perhaps the most intriguing visual aspect of Waves is how Doyle’s images of Macau, Hong Kong and Phuket differ from… familiar images of those cities… “That’s part of our job, right? …
… “When I shot Last Life in Bangkok, the city was to me very poetic, and in fact until I made the film I didn’t see Bangkok that way.What happens is that the engagement of the film process actually takes you somewhere special. It’s not an objective thing, but it’s our response to the space we choose to live in or we choose to photograph, because we feel this is expressing how we feel. It’s quite subjective. Maybe some people would say ‘oh I didn’t know Macau’s like this’. But this space exists and this space has a certain poetry and these people belong in this space, or don’t belong in this space.So yes, this is my Macau, or this is my New York, or this is my Bangkok. Or yes, this is how Phuket feels to me.” [Set pic of Mr. Doyle’s refreshment via Twitchfilm.]
