Celebrated photographer and director Nuri Bilge Ceylan may only have directed six films, but his career already stretches back over a decade. When we spoke, Ceylan was in the UK to attend the London Film Festival with his latest offering, Three Monkeys. London and Ceylan have a special relationship – it was the city that inspired his love for film as young man.
LWLies: You spent some of your formative years in London before you went to film school, right? What does it mean for you to come back here now?
Ceylan: When I graduated, English was the only foreign language I could speak, therefore I chose to come to London. That was a period when I was trying to decide what to do in life. I came here and I started to work as a waiter in the restaurants – a Greek restaurant, actually, and in a Wimpy. Is there a Wimpy now? But in the meantime I was going to exhibitions, movies. And actually in that first coming I was not sure that I wanted to be a filmmaker; I was just thinking what to do. And in the end I think I decided to be a photographer first, in that first visit. Then I went to Nepal in India to find a solution – to decide what to in life. I decided to try the East also, but the East didn’t give me any answers so I went back to Turkey and went into military service. I clearly remember that in military service I decided to make films.
LWLies: Why photography first?
Ceylan: I was a photography artist but I thought I could make a living in photography also, I knew the technique. I bought a second hand camera here in London before I went back, and I worked as an advertising photographer for some time. But in the military service I definitely decided to make films.
LWLies: Was that a bolt from the blue realisation that that’s what you wanted to do?
Ceylan: Actually it was quite a sudden realisation. It was after I read the autobiography of Roman Polanski. I was reading a lot of books during military service because I was alone; I didn’t know anybody and all my friends were away. That was the period that I read books most, you know? And the loneliness is also very important I think in that situation – you can take big decisions if you are lonely, you know? Boredom makes you take big decisions. And Polanski’s book influenced me a lot – a life starting from zero, and an adventure… His life was very impressive for me, and I felt that I could do cinema also, technically. But in those days there were no video cameras so I couldn’t try my abilities in a cheap way. So after the military service I decided to come back to London again, hoping that I could maybe study a course on cinema to speed up the process. This time I was not aimless; before I was just thinking what to do next, but this time I had an idea. I couldn’t study here but instead I went to many movies. There was a friend here and I was staying in his house – he was working but every morning I used to go to Kings Cross and see three movies one after the other, and after that another cinemathèque, so probably I watched three movies a day. My passion for cinema increased in that period, and the NFT was also a very important place for me.
LWLies: Do you think the UK has influenced either your style or your sensibility?
Ceylan: I was very lonely here also, and I think loneliness is the most impressive thing. You are very open to effects if you are lonely, and the films influenced me much more than before, you know? I remember some films that I didn’t like before, but when I watched them here again it influenced me a lot because I was more receptive.
LWLies: Do you have an example?
Ceylan: Solaris, for instance. When I watched it in Turkey I didn’t know Tarkovsky at that time so when it was brought to Turkey, to my university, I watched it and I thought, ‘What is this?’ Half-way through the film I just walked out. But when I watched it in the NFT here again, because of the loneliness, my soul was more receptive, and the film affected me a great amount. Three days later I was only thinking about the film. Then I think watching films here was my first school, ever of cinema, because I think watching films is the best school and the best way of learning cinema. When I went back to Turkey again after maybe six months I studied cinema for about three years but then I left it because it seemed to me a bit time consuming, because I was not so young. And after that, to start to make my first short film took about 10 more years – I think the starting point is the most difficult. And as I said before, there were no video cameras to try things easily. Then I bought a 35mm camera and I shot my first short film. I started to shoot it myself first, without any assistance, just like photography, but I couldn’t do the focus-pulling myself as the same time as shooting…
LWLies: You said at the Q&A yesterday that you’re a control freak. If it was possible would you make a movie entirely on your own?
Ceylan: Yes, but I think when I am going more into cinema, I learned to trust other people also. My first short film and feature film, I just made them with two people including myself. I was using the camera and there was just one focus-puller. But in Climates, when I acted, I had to use a cinematographer because I was acting and I saw that having a cinematographer is a better thing because you can of course dictate to him what to do – you yourself dictate the placing of the camera, or which lens should be used, then you can still control the image. To control the image you don’t have to use the camera – this was a somehow unnecessary obsession. So now I like to work with other people and I like to control them in a more comfortable way.
LWLies: More specifically on Three Monkeys, I wanted to ask you about the character of the mother. One of the characters talks about ‘the struggle to survive’. The mother seems to embody that struggle – it seems like she’s exploited by her husband’s boss, but ultimately you treat her in a cruel way. She gets humiliated in the scene in which she clings to him. It’s an old-fashioned view, as if she has an excess of passion. It’s a very male point-of-view. What’s your view on that? Your voice in the film seems to be saying that she deserves that punishment.
Ceylan: No, nobody deserves anything, of course.
LWLies: When you see her in the bushes outside his house with that look on her face – that didn’t ring true to her character because suddenly she goes from being exploited to being a crazy woman. She crosses a line, and it seemed like an unfair transition.
Ceylan: She didn’t do anything when she looked through the bushes. Just looking…
LWLies: But the very fact that she’s there…
Ceylan: He tried to smile a bit because she’s calling him many times but he doesn’t answer – his secretary is always saying that he’s not available and things like that. Her husband is about to come out of prison, so that pressure makes her wonder what’s happening and to get desperate. What she did is just look; she didn’t do something crazy at the end.
LWLies: But the very fact that she’s there… At the beginning of this relationship, the boss takes advantage of her because she comes to him wanting money, she’s alone and he sees an opportunity to sleep with her. To then say that this woman who has been ‘abused’ actually falls in love with him seems old fashioned, maybe even misogynistic.
Ceylan: Do you think that human nature changes with time? I don’t think so. It was the same 1,000 years ago. Two thousand years ago.
LWLies: But I think it’s dangerous territory to say that a woman who’s being exploited then falls in love with the man who’s exploiting her.
Ceylan: But it could be a man also, if you reverse the situation. I think it’s still valid. It’s not because she’s a woman.
LWLies: Historically, you know… The word ‘hysteria’ is the Greek for a woman’s private parts, so you’re buying into this very ancient, pejorative view of female sexuality. It was never applied to men in the same way it was to women.
Ceylan: For me, man or woman doesn’t matter – I never separate them. I am more interested with what’s happening in the soul of a human being. It could be a man or a woman. Here, in my previous film, the same kind of situation maybe was in the man. I mean, the man was in a more… But in this story, we cannot say that the woman is bad or the man is good. We don’t give the positive thing to the man. Everybody is bad and good at the same time. I just try to be as realistic as possible. There is always an irrational dimension to love; we cannot rationalise it sometimes. Even when the boss runs away from the woman, I think her tendency to make it more obsessive is because… It’s not necessary to follow a logic or to analyse it for consistency. In terms of love, it has always had an irrational dimension, so acts coming out of love don’t have to make sense. In the film, she had very strong reasons why she might fall in love with him because of the man’s influential, powerful position. What I mean by irrational is that I don’t want to rationalise everything. There is always a rational thing in my mind of course. The woman… Do you think that this woman can love this man? I feel yes, because we always have a tendency to have an interest in power and authority, and this man, when he gets into the luxury car and her family have no car at all, he creates a certain kind of feeling – to be in serenity. I have observed this in my own life also, in my childhood when I lived in the town and I went to the house of a friend that was rich, suddenly I get a different feeling. Whatever they do seems to me to be right in that position. As soon as the woman enters that car, if there is a sign from the man to the woman, I think the woman is ready for something. The same could be true in the reverse way. If a poor guy goes into a rich woman’s world, the same effect may happen to him also. And then this powerful man offers her something, because he says, ‘I can do whatever you like,’ then her mind is complicated. That’s natural. Then there’s a time lapse at that point and we don’t know what happened, but we understand that the relationship has evolved, and after that, when the man begins to be afraid of the obsession of the woman, it’s natural that he tries to push her away. When you are pushed away, it’s natural that you push in the reverse way, so I think even myself in life would do the same thing – would go to the house and look in the window because there is no other choice. When she can’t reach him on the telephone, she just goes to the house because there’s nothing else to do. You would go there out of desperation expecting a kind of miracle. You want something to change. But I didn’t show that she does crazy things over there, she just hides herself and she doesn’t show herself to his wife, for instance. So it was very hard for me to decide what her expression should be. And because she wants to hide her obsession, at the same time it shows somehow. So I decided on her strange smiling expression.
LWLies: Okay, let’s move on from that. I was reading a report from Cannes from a Turkish newspaper. The way they talked about how your film was received, showed that the perception of your film was very much linked to the perception of the country – the success of Three Monkeys was seen as being a success for the whole of Turkey. What kind of pressure does that put on you as a Turkish filmmaker?
Ceylan: I’m sure it adds some feeling of duty or responsibility, but the theme of the film could easily be happening in any other country – I don’t think it is specific to Turkey or Turkish people. The driving force in my case that makes me feel like making films is not what’s separating Turkish people in character from every other nation, on the contrary, it’s the common points between the whole of humanity.
LWLies: Is there much censorship in Turkey as the secular government comes under pressure from the Islamic influence?
Ceylan: To be honest, the issues I deal with in my films are not at least directly related to what’s sensitive or not sensitive in the political scene in Turkey, so therefore I’m not directly influenced by what’s going on. And I could not stop filmmaking. But in Turkey I don’t think that censorship is very bad’ it’s quite soft actually. And even the filmmakers who make political films, I think they can do whatever they want. But even if the censorship is very hard, I think that is not a problem for filmmakers, you know. In Iran, they make very beautiful films.
LWLies: That’s kind of what I was thinking of. Rafi Pitts was telling us that censorship has been the making of Iranian film.
Ceylan: It increases the creativity, I think. Maybe that’s the reason for the success of Iranian film.
LWLies: The subtext of Three Monkeys is in a way about how through telling lies you can reach a kind of emotional truth. In a perverse way, this family, by lying to each other, are revealing a deeper honesty about their feelings towards each other. Do you think cinema works in the same way – an act of fiction that reveals a deeper truth?
Ceylan: I think if such a hope is not available for me, I wouldn’t make movies. My intention is to reach a certain reality, I mean, away from the clichés, a deeper, more true reality. That is one of my aims. Because it’s one of the most difficult things maybe in life. Showing what is obvious in a film, I mean, making a film about this – I wouldn’t do it because I would be very lazy to do it. With my films, I would like to reach a certain reality that even I myself wouldn’t reach without making the film. Maybe I cannot succeed, but that is my intention.
