“I don’t have to understand what’s going on”: the director Anthony Bourdain called “the best”
He may have been a chef by trade, but in addition to becoming one of the most popular television personalities of his era, Anthony Bourdain was also a keen student of cinema.
Not that he ever became a regular on-screen presence in a fictional context, though, with his filmography as a hired actor making for bizarrely fascinating reading. His first movie role came when he made an uncredited cameo as a scientist in video game adaptation Far Cry, which hailed from one of the worst directors in cinema history.
Debuting under the wretched stewardship of Uwe Boll did at least mean there was nowhere left to go but up, even if Bourdain only notched a handful of voice-only gigs before making his final feature-length outing playing himself in the socio-economic satire The Big Short, where he used seafood stew to analogise collateral debt obligation as one does.
Bourdain’s list of his favourite feature films spanned decades and incorporated some of the medium’s most daring and innovative auteurs, but there was one who left a particularly large impression. That tends to happen when the filmmaker in question is regarded as one of the all-time greats and a byword for modern excellence, curating a back catalogue that could be watched over and over.
“I could watch the work of Wong Kar-wai (and the brilliant cinematographer Christopher Doyle) all day long,” he said. “I don’t have to understand what’s going on; I don’t care. Beautiful people, photographed beautifully. His films are the best, most romantic out there.”
Doyle has collaborated with Zhang Yimou, M. Night Shyamalan, Gus Van Sant, Barry Levinson, Jim Jarmusch, and Alejandro Jodorowsky during a stellar career as a DP, but his work with Kar-wai is undoubtedly the most famous professional partnership of his entire career.
The duo teamed on Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time, Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, and In the Mood for Love, which made such an impression on Bourdain that he went full-blown fanboy when he headed to Hong Kong to shoot Parts Unknown.
“I have long been particularly besotted with the work of Wong Kar-wai’s frequent collaborator and director of photography, Christopher Doyle,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “For me, he was always the Big Kahuna. For years now, every time I visit Hong Kong, I can’t look at it without thinking of his incredible work on such films as Fallen Angels, Chungking Express and his masterpiece, In the Mood for Love.”
Bourdain had always wanted him to appear on the show just to tell people he’d worked with Doyle, and to his “eternal gratitude”, the offer was accepted. He may have never gotten the chance to partner up with Kar-wai, but the cinematographer responsible for several of his greatest films was a more than acceptable substitute.
