”Dialogue, for me, only works if they talk nonsense, anything unrelated to the film. I like to do this as much as possible. I try to tell the meaning of the film without dialogue – with the situation, the gestures, and so on.” — Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Still from Climates (2006, dir. Ceylan)
“Every director tries to impose on his movies his own truth, his own reality. Most of my decisions are instinctive. I have to admit that I enjoy this fight between author, cinema and fake Hollywood stories. But artistic honesty depends on your intentions as a director, not in the technique. It’s really easy to lie in cinema. Even if you are into realism, not using any kind of special effects, it’s easy to hide the truth from the audience.”
— Nuri Bilge Ceylan (read the rest of the interview here)
I’ve returned from the Berlin Film Festival’s (Berlinale) Talent Campus. It was an incredible, inspiring, exhausting and insightful week with 350 filmmakers from around the world. I attended panel discussions on the business aspects of film distributions, the intricate world of co-productions (makes me nervous), and master classes with some of the best filmmakers around…among them Nuri Bilge Ceylan.
The still above is from his film, Climates, and he talked about the very scene that this still is taken from. He is from Turkey and shoots with non-professional actors (the actress in the still is his wife) and he elaborated on the interesting contradiction of getting actors to not ‘concentrate’ on a film set. His films have a tension to them that is taken from real life moments, characters’ inability to talk about certain things, and day to day events. But for those moments to be fraught with the tension that they have in daily life, there needs to be a lack of heightened drama on the set. Sets tend to be the exact opposite because there are so many technicalities, personalities, and objectives occurring at the same time.
There’s a desire in him to always keep things small and personal on a technical level so he can hopefully reach the transcendent and magnanimous on the cinematic level. Things that are very obvious I guess, but inspiring when you consider cinema as an international art form and language that everybody is speaking…even a young boy born and raised in a rural village of Turkey.
