Thursday, June 2, 2011

Christopher Doyle gets co-directing credit on Takashi Shimizu's "Rabbit Horror 3D"

by Chris MaGee

You can't normally sell a film on the name of its cinematographer and you rarely, if ever, see a cinematographer getting a co-directing nod on a film. Then again, not all cinematographers are Christopher Doyle. The 59-year-old Australian ex-pat has made a name for himself with his wildly creative and super-saturated shooting styles on films directed by the likes of Edward Yang, Wong Kar Wai, Stanley Kwan, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang and Zhang Yimou. Although he's been kicking around East Asia for a quarter of a century he's only now making a dent into Japan. Doyle recently worked as cinematographer on Shinji Imaoka's pink musical "Underwater Love". Doyle is following this up with work on a new 3D horror film by Takashi Shimizu and starring Hikari Mitsushima titled "Rabbit Horror".

This past week Twitch reported that Christopher Doyle is being credited alongside Shimizu as the co-director of "Rabbit Horror 3D". It's easy to imagine Doyle contributing a wealth of visual ideas to a production, especially a psychological horror film about a young boy who starts to become unhinged and develops a friendship with his toy rabbit, but Shimizu is no rank amateur either. This is the man who helped invent J-horror with films like "Ju-on", "Rinne" and "Marebito" after all. It will certainly be interesting for film fans to finally see what Shimizu and what Doyle have contributed to "Rabbit Horror 3D" once it gets released this September.

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