Nuri Bilge Ceylan On His Beginnings And Art- An Interview

(This is an early interview from 1997 that Güldal Kızıldemir did for the Turkish newspaper Radikal. Translation by Saliha Enzenauer)

“States like meaninglessness and melancholy can only be melted in a transcendental value. Art is one of these values.”

Nuri Bilge Ceylan

You received two big awards so far for your first feature film, The Small Town (1997). Moreover, with a very personal and quite unusual movie.

Yes. So I wasn’t expecting to get the awards.

You seem to have made a documentary of a world that you know very well. How do you know this world?

I grew up in that town. Actually, I was born in Istanbul as a child to a family of civil servants. My family was born and raised in the town of Yenice in Çanakkale, the town in the movie. My father was the only person in that region who had studied, and under very difficult circumstances. Because at that time, there was not even a primary school in Yenice. My father was an agricultural engineer in Istanbul, but when I was two years old, he wanted to use his knowledge in the lands where he was born and grew up in, and decided to settle there for extremely idealistic purposes. So my childhood passed in Yenice.

What kind of environment was it? What kind of town?

It was a very typical town. It was an environment where values, truths and wrongs were sharply defined. In this environment, my father’s view of life differed greatly from those around him. We lived in that town for eight years, and over time we witnessed my father’s idealism slowly becoming a disappointment.

And you wanted to return to Istanbul.

We wanted to return, and actually we had to return because there was no high school there and my sister was in high school age. We returned to Istanbul when I had finished the fourth grade of primary school, and for many years we lived without my father because they would not transfer his position. We lived quite a poor life in Istanbul for a while. I never forget that smoking stove that left pharyngitis on my mother. She constantly coughs and I remember those days whenever I hear her coughing.

You seem very attached to your family. Even in your movie, your parents play the lead roles. The screenplay is from your sister.

I grew up in a typical family, and growing up in a typical family is actually not a bad thing for a child. Because the child’s spirit does not want to feel very different anyway. You want to be like other people and perceive differences as a crime when a child. In my childhood I could not pronounce the R’s. So I wouldn’t call myself Nuri, but would use my middle name Bilge. But Bilge is a unisex name, it is also a girl’s name. There was a literature teacher. When I told him that my name was Bilge, he said to me: “How can you use that girl’s name,” He made fun of me in front of everyone. I worked on the ‘r’ that night and solved the problem. The thing I hate most in life is humiliation.

Being different provides a feeling of guilt. You seem to have had your share of guilt.

My consciousness would especially focus on my differences. It has been like that since childhood, as it creates a sense of guilt. You know, there is a specific mechanism in childhood. You have to mock in order to not be ridiculed. The power relationships begin as a child, at school.

How has moving from the small town to Istanbul changed your life?

I think the most important event that affected my life in Istanbul was that I started to study at Boğaziçi University. Actually, I do not know exactly how I decided to study Electrical Engineering. I had an admiration for the West, and the Boğaziçi University fueled this thoroughly. As you know, the institution has a side that directs people towards the West.* Somehow you assume that you’ll finish school, then go to the West and live there. It looked like my fate was laying in the West. (*Founded in 1863, as Robert College, the University is the first American higher education institution founded outside the United States)

Had you ever gone there?

During the summer holidays, I was going on vacations hitchhiking or by bicycle, starting when I was seventeen. Of course, this relationship with the West was a very exotic one. The West did not show us its true face, and it was a relationship that didn’t make us feel or see if our own souls were suitable for it. Rather, these journeys were like a chain of adventures to be told when returning.

Did you start with photography in those years?

Of course. I’ve been taking pictures since I was sixteen. When I graduated, I went on to live this profession without even having to question it.

Where was that?

I went to London with very little money. But it didn’t matter, since it seemed more important to live through adventures. I did jobs like everybody else without money in London, like being a waiter and dishwasher. I even did market theft.

The electrical engineer is now a market thief.

Yes. In my third year I got alienated with the electrical engineering issue and opened up. I started thinking about following a new path with photography, with which my relationship deepened.

Have you ever been caught when doing market theft?

I got caught twice. The second time, a fifteen-year-old boy took me by the arm and kicked me out. I stumbled out to a crowd of people. I felt very humiliated. It was the first time I felt that my pride had been really hurt. I walked the streets without seeing people for a long time.

Not stealing is important, but to not get caught.

You never think that you will get caught. I remember seeing a mirror while walking on the street that day- I had never seen my face so maskless. The sense of humiliation that came with being caught triggered something inside me. The sense of meaninglessness that occurred within me had started to grow already. The values of the West gradually began to appear as values that did not fit my soul. One day, in a bookstore, I came across a book on the Himalayas. It was like a promise and hope hoping from the East. I was very interested in the things described in the book.

Have you stolen it?

Not that one, but I stole many books. After I got caught, I stole nothing anymore.

You decided to leave the West?

I decided to leave the West to never return. That was my feeling at that time. The feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness had grown inside me, and I was very lonely. Human relations began to be very difficult. I started to feel that there was an immense distance between me and the West. I flew to Nepal over Athens. I walked 400 kilometers on the Himalayas in a month or two, but the meaning I was looking for did not show itself to me.

So, roads and travelling didn’t help either.

No. Wherever I looked, it was the same trees, the same clouds, everywhere. For the first time I thought that traveling or adventure did not have the potential to fill the void inside of me. After sitting on top of a Buddhist temple hill and watching the mountains, I suddenly realized that I missed Turkey a lot and decided to go back.

Eventually you returned to Turkey.

Yes. I joined the military to do my mandatory service. The military served me very well during that anarchistic period, as a goal, as something that had to be done. I did my service in Ankara, and it made me discover something new. I have encountered a rich mosaic of people from all layers of the Turkish society, which I had been insulating for a long time because of attending the elitist Boğaziçi University. It was a mosaic of people that I remembered from childhood and youth, but had abandoned and forgotten for quite a while. I developed a love for my country again. I had the feeling that I had found the place I belonged to. My days in Ankara were also very lonely, but it was the period in which I thought, watched movies, and read books the most. I definitely decided to make films during that period in my life.

Is cinema something that can just be done when you decide it?

I showed an effort, of course. I wanted to learn more techniques so that I could trust myself, and so I went to the Dost Bookstore in Ankara and bought all the books on cinema that I found there, I’ve read old books that I found at American and British culture councils. Cinema is more endless. Compared to photography, it seemed to me to be more of an art that could accommodate the depth of life. The source of this force was the effect of some film directors on me.

Who are they?

Bergman. I watched Silence when I was 16, and then his other films. Then Antonioni entered my life. At that time, I didn’t know Tarkovsky and Bresson yet.

Then you went to Istanbul.

Yes. I thought I should understand the system better. Cinema production is a complex organization, a field that requires complex human relations. I thought I had to study cinema to feel more competent, and I attended the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. I studied there for two years, as the oldest student of the entire school. I took advantage of the school’s archive. Mimar Sinan increased my confidence.

You were thirty years old then.

Yes. I abandoned photography completely, but still I couldn’t make a movie. There was fear, insecurity, and it seemed like I always found reasons to postpone. The excuses I made up to postpone made me feel like I was hiding a fact that I was afraid to face.

What was that?

Fear of incompetence. For example, I could not write a script. So years passed. Then somehow I got my 20-minute short film Cocoon (orig. Koza) done. Cocoon was like an experiment to end the torture I put on myself by not producing movies. Shooting took a year. There was no script. I was trying to grasp a world that I could capture with my intuition, my perceptions. There was no dialogue. I literally threw myself into shooting my first movie, and Cocoon was the result. I had no idea what it was like, because it was not like the movies I watched. But when I was accepted to the Cannes Film Festival, I felt a little more confident. Most of the cinema techniques that I tried to learn I did learn while shooting this movie.

How many people have worked on the movie?

Two people. In my next movie, The Small Town (orig. Kasaba) it was the same. I remember one of Dostoyevski’s quotes: “There is nothing better than to just start a work.”

It took you some time, but okay...

Yes, things move when you just start somehow. With the confidence given to me by Cocoon, my next film The Small Town came much easier. We were two people again, me and my assistant Sadık İncesu. We did everything in this movie, the entire production and carrying stuff around.

Did you finance it yourself?

I am an impatient person. Everything takes so long when it doesn’t start. I started filming first, and then I started looking for money. I was planning a low-budget movie and had some savings, just enough to get me along a little. The movie ended up costing fifty thousand dollars; I had thought that I would need a lot more money. That is a very small budget for cinema. Of course most of that budget went into postproduction.

Did you have a screenplay?

That time there was a script. My starting point was a story of my sister Emine Ceylan. There were autobiographical elements in it and leanings from Chekhov, my favorite writer. There was a script, but all those ideas came to me during shooting. Not before shooting, but after operating the camera. I changed the script a lot at that point. The actors were surprised because they had to do things they did not rehearse. The actors did not know what happened in front of and behind the play they were taking part in at that moment. They were saying things they didn’t understand why.

What you call actors were also your parents. Did they want to take part?

No. They never asked for it, but could not resist my insistence and became my actors.

Did they like themselves when they watched the film?

They did not watch it. They are people which are very far from cinema. I have never seen my father watching movies even on TV; he watches the news.

They really didn’t watch it?

I made my mom watch some of it and she said, “Oh my son, who’s going to watch this?”. I showed my father a little of it as well, but he didn’t watch it all, he laughed.

How did you persuade them to play in it?

I find various ways to make them pity me. I also complained about how much I would have to pay other actors, that also seemed to be effective.

Did you overcome your sense of meaninglessness when you made this movie?

In fact, states like meaninglessness and melancholy can only be melted in a transcendental value. Art is one of these values. What we can call “neurotic feelings“, meaning human differences, can only be melted within such a transcendent value. I think art was very good for that melancholic side of mine. It had a therapeutic effect.

Interview by Güldal Kızıldemir

Read all stories in our special about Nuri Bilge Ceylan and his films:
Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (2011)
Winter Sleep (2014)
The Wild Pear Tree (2018)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan On His Beginnings And Art- An Interview