Theatre was an early influence on cinematographer Christopher Doyle, so working with the experimental Operating Theatre joins a lot of dots, he tells Peter Crawley.

'I'm the muck-raiser," says Christopher Doyle, with a quick snigger that makes his grey eyes brighten and his grey curls shake. "I'm the shit-stirrer. I'm the spanner in the works." As concise a job description as the Australian-born, Hong Kong-based film-maker gives, I'd still like to know what he puts on his business cards. But Doyle, a cinematographer whose unique visual style in Asian cinema has made him a more recognisable name than many of the directors he works with, knows the value of being contrary.

"My job is always to say, 'What if?'," he continues. "I think that's the job of any artist. And most people who work with me know what they're in for. These poor buggers are doing it for the first time, so they're a bit shocked by the implications of their intent. They're a bit surprised: he is worse than we thought."

The poor buggers in question are Operating Theatre, the experimental company founded 25 years ago by performer Olwen Fouéré and composer Roger Doyle (no relation).

Their most recent production, Here Lies, an installation based on the French poet and dramatist Artonin Artaud's ill-fated pilgrimage to Ireland in 1937, directed by Selina Cartmell and first performed in the Imperial Hotel during Galway Arts Festival in 2005, is now the basis for a film project.

When the idea of making a film of the performance, together with a multi-media installation to play in art galleries was first mooted, Cartmell immediately suggested Doyle. As Ali Curran, the producer who tracked down the perpetually busy cinematographer puts it: "We didn't want a director of photography. We wanted an artist."

When we met in Paris, where Here Lies was performing at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, the question was why Doyle - who insists he will only work for friends - had devoted himself to the project.

"Don't forget my family name is Doyle," he said. "If Artaud went to Ireland, why shouldn't I? I have more obvious links."

HIS LINKS TO theatre are less obvious, though. And Here Lies, a performance that takes all of 10 minutes to watch, in which Fouéré plays Artaud as a tragi-comic figure, hunched, prowling and confined to a narrow glass box, wouldn't seem to translate easily to film. But Doyle seems undaunted, comfortably discussing film in non-cinematic terms, and more frequently referring to it as a dance between the camera and the actor.

"I actually fell into film through theatre," Doyle says over a late-evening drink when he has finally been disentangled from an entourage that tonight includes the Hong Kong model Li Xin and the French arthouse film producers MK2. "And I fell into theatre through studying Chinese. So for me language, performance and one's journey are very closely related."

Doyle, now 52, first left Sydney when he was 18 to join the merchant navy. ("I was always a traveller.") After three years spent travelling the world, he disembarked in Taiwan to study Mandarin, where he fell in with a group of artists.

"We had a theatre group," he recalls, "and I actually lit, directed and acted in a few things, but we were at a very primal kind of stage. At that time, Chinese society was just evolving from a fairly rigorous and controlled period of its history, and we were kind of looking for a new voice. And that voice happened to be through theatre and actually through many of the teachings - believe it or not - of people like Artaud and Grotowski and Stanislavski."

Here Lies, then, "linked a lot of dots for me I guess",

A self-taught cinematographer, Doyle's approach to film is intuitive, recognising the value of a mistake and even incorporating his errors into the mise en scène. The black and white sequences of Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels, for instance, were the result of defective film stock which were then used to give an aesthetic structure to the film. "We just appropriated the mistake and made it work," Doyle once said. "It's a more intuitive, or, maybe, Asian way of working."

Doyle's association with the idiosyncratic auteur Wong - they have made eight films together - best illustrates that Asian way of working. Filming without a script or a schedule, their films are not so much made as "found".

The method is so time-consuming, however, that their last collaboration, 2046, took five years to complete. This may be a world away from the storyboarded certainties and strict deadlines of Hollywood, but Doyle has experience of both, balancing his work for Chinese directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige with American projects for Gus Van Sant, Barry Levinson and M Night Shyamalan.

Not that he has any great fondness for Hollywood. In a recent broadside against The Departed, Martin Scorsese's remake of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs (which Doyle worked on), he lamented Hollywood's "mediocre" appropriation of Asian cinema, where "accountants are making non-subtitled versions of what we do." Doyle's version of what Operating Theatre does is currently at a curious and vaguely defined stage.

A film of the installation is hoped to be ready by this summer, but no one involved could be held to any dates. "It doesn't matter whether we make a film version of the piece," says Doyle. "That was never even a consideration. I think it was: so what would happen if this piece had another form?"

Nevertheless, film is the medium in which Doyle is "most current", he says, "so we have pursued that to see what it gives. At the moment it has given us an expansion of the space - so far that's all." Such statements are more than a little cryptic, but expanding the space of Here Lies seems, literally, to involve thinking outside the box.

Indeed, the following day, on a cold and wet Parisian morning, Fouéré had been liberated from her glass box to rehearse her movements in the courtyard of the Centre Culturel Irlandais.

As Fouéré, who described herself as "a reluctant actor, a reluctant camera subject, a reluctant everything", steadily recreated her confines on the damp pebbles, Doyle darted around the scene with bird-like energy, training a tiny camera on the performer while snapping stills of everything around her. "Ideas are being thrown, left right and centre at the moment," Fouéré told me later. "Whatever ideas Chris comes up with, you just go with it and see what happens."

"This collaboration is open-ended," Doyle said. "There's no obligation to produce; there's no deadline, so it is organic."

In an allusion that would chill the blood of any producer, he even compared the work to making the Sagrada Família, the still-unfinished church in Barcelona which began construction in 1882. (Its architect, Antoni Gaudí, used to dismiss questions about its anticipated completion by saying, "My client is not in a hurry.")

IF DOYLE HAS absorbed an intuitive and spontaneous Asian approach to craft, he has also assumed an Asian identity. His name in Chinese is Du Ke Feng, meaning "like the wind", a description conferred on him by his first Chinese teacher, borrowed from the Confucian idea that "the virtue of a gentleman is like wind".

"It's a very poetic name," he says approvingly. "And what is the wind? It's non-existent sometimes. It changes. Sometimes it's violent, sometimes it's refreshing, sometimes it's oppressing, so in other words it encompasses all the qualities of someone with a forceful nature. It's a very beautiful name and it's much less common than Christopher Doyle."

It also means he can refer to himself as two separate identities: "Christopher Doyle takes the piss out of Du Ke Feng from time to time and complains about his artistic pretensions. And Du Ke Feng complains about Chris Doyle trying to get drunk and get laid all the time. It's a great relationship. They're really good friends."

In the courtyard of the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Du Ke Feng seemed to have taken charge, moving around the space with the force of a sudden gust, then subsiding like a light breeze, all the while snapping pictures from oblique angles, chatting to Chinese students in Mandarin, or encouraging passers-by to stray in and out of the shot.

After watching Doyle dart contentedly around the action for about half an hour or so (for a man without a deadline he seemed to be in a constant hurry), eventually I lost sight of him and paused to read a notice board.

From nowhere there came two quick snaps, and I turned around to see Doyle grinning. "Ha ha!" he said, lowering his camera. "Gotcha!"