Biography

Has worked as an oil driller in India, a cow herder in Israel, and a doctor of Chinese medicine in Thailand.

Shot Gus Van Sant's remake Psycho (1998) without having seen the original.

In addition to Mandarin and French, he speaks Cantonese fluently, and is taking lessons in Spanish, Japanese and Thai. His Chinese is at a higher level than his English.

Said in an interview that he might not get along with notoriously difficult and demanding directors like James Cameron or Michael Mann, but he also was never offered work by them. In general, Doyle said, he prefers much more to work with first-time directors and tries to "enjoy each other's company". [The Film Stage, Dec. 2019].

Speaks fluent French and Mandarin

I left Australia when I was 18 and I've been a foreigner for 36 years. I think that's very important to the way I work because as a foreigner you see things differently. But I started making Chinese-language films so I regard myself as a Chinese filmmaker. I just happen to be white. Or pink, actually.

I really think music and movement - dance, you know - and literature inform my visuals. I think film is also based in dance. The relationship between me, the camera and the actor is always a dance.

I went to France and tried to learn cinematography. Then I realized that I didn't care. So I came back to making films as I could. I think I started to know what I was doing in the middle of Days of Being Wild (1990). You can't learn how to make films. You gotta make mistakes and you have to appropriate the mistakes, and then you learn from those things. Then you have a voice.

I went to Taiwan to study Chinese and, as usual, I hung out in bars, and people in bars are usually musicians and artistic kinds of people. I had accumulated a little life experience so I could articulate things which were a little bit more complex than I could actually do and for some reason Edward Yang trusted me. And then we made this film ("That Day on the Beach," 1983) that won all these awards and I didn't know what I was doing. I fluked it.

My best film is always my next film. I couldn't make Chungking Express (1994) now, because of the way I live and drink I've forgotten how I did it. I don't believe in film school or film theory. Just try and get in there and make the bloody film, do good work and be with people you love.