"Brought up in suburban Sydney, he left Australia at 18 to join the merchant navy. After three years travelling the world on a Norwegian ship, he came ashore again, and lived in India, Israel and Thailand. He then decided to learn Mandarin, and gravitated to Taiwan, where the courses were cheaper than in Hong Kong. (He's now so fluent, he has to say his phone number out loud in Mandarin before he can work out what it is in English.)
In Taiwan, he fell in with a group of creatively minded people, one of whom asked him to film an ethnomusicological documentary he was making. He won a prize for his first 35mm film, Edward Yang's That Day on the Beach, at which point he realised he was a professional cinematographer. "That scared the poop out of me. We were just playing around before. So I ran away to France to try and learn competence, and I realised it was all bullshit. You only need a little bit of technical knowledge. Most people can get it in a couple of months. The training of the eye is the real job, and that takes forever."
