Between the eye and the hand

A few nice quotes from an interview with Christopher Doyle, the cinematographer behind such films as Chunking Express and In The Mood For Love (and its sequel 2046)

(...) in Chinese, they say, "Your eye is high but your hand is low," which means you can't achieve what you want to do. You have all these fucking aspirations, you expect to do something great, and actually you complicate things. Because your hand is low.

That's the thing: the balance between being so fucking involved in something that it has energy, it has intimacy, it contacts people, and yet being removed enough to say, "Yes, no, yes, no, no." That's the job.

That's just it. I think the whole thing about filmmaking is that it has to be engaging enough that I have to believe enough of what I'm seeing that it becomes universal. It's really that simple.

I think this is what's happening, that we actually are moving into an area where the audience is more sophisticated than the critics.

How did you come up with the blurry skip-frame style that you used in films like Chungking Express and Fallen Angels?

Boredom. I think it was about boredom.

I also found another, calmer, interview with Doyle in the Guarian.