Cinematographer Christopher Doyle (Chungking Express, Hero) made waves last year with his thoughts on Claudio Miranda‘s Best Cinematography win for Life of Pi, which included statements such as “what a total fucking piece of shit… since 97 per cent of the film is not under his control, what the fuck are you talking about cinematography?” Well, now he’s back with another interview, this time with The Playlist‘s Jessica Kiang, and while telling stories of dancing with nuns with an erection and reiterating how much he loves women he ripped off this little gem of a sequence I thought I’d share.
So what do you see as being the next phase of evolution for Cinematography?
That’s like saying “so are you still going to your local bank or do you trust the world bank?” It’s the one percent and the 99 percent. We’re the 99 percent: the people like me and [Ruined Heart director] Khavn and [producer] Stefan are gonna make the films as we can make them, and the 1 percent will go off into their gravity-less world. Where it’s fantastic, they’ve got like the Hubble telescope and you’ve got us here on Earth.
Are you referring also to the movie Gravity?
Well yes, that was the joke I was trying to make. But their gravity is money. Which is fine, just go ahead, but I don’t feel much a part of that because of all the other bullshit that comes with it. It’s a political movement basically, coming with all the complications, all the bureaucracy and all the accountants.
It’s like the guy who did Narnia 2. I just happened to be in Poland, doing a small film that I wrote and directed in Warsaw, and there’s a party for Narnia 2, like, the opening, I don’t know what. And the guy comes up to me and says, “Chris, I’m going through hell.” And I say why, and he says “$278 million budget. It’s not a film, I’m dealing with accountants the whole time, it’s all about the money. After this,” he says, “I’m not gonna do anything over $30 million!” [Doyle laughs uproariously] Like that was nothing!
But we’re gonna struggle in the trenches, because ultimately I think how many bloody remakes of things can you watch? That’s going to shift, the demographic will shift, and then those poor fuckers will have to come back to us. It’s happened always: it happened in the ’60s in American film, you have Easy Rider. It happened with the New Wave.
You sell your popcorn and your shit, and then they’ll see everyone’s online watching these really great films watching made by young people in Indonesia or Burma, and fuck your special effects. And then the money people will say “oh shit, too much is happening online” and of course they have to chase the money, but by that stage the money will be us.
Read the full interview here, it’s worth it.
