Nuri Bilge Ceylan interview

Geoff Andrew talks to Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan about his new film 'Climates'.

Jan 26 2007

Nuri Bilge Ceylan caught the film bug in the mid-'80s, during a lonely stretch living in London. It was a time spent working as a waiter, visiting bookshops, reading this magazine and going to the cinema, where he recalls discovering Tarkovsky. It was an unhappy period, too, during which he struggled to make ends meet. Eventually, he left London and went to the Himalayas, wondering what to do next.

'One day, after some months, when I was sitting in a Buddhist temple looking at the mountains, I suddenly missed my country very much,' he explains. 'It was maybe a year that I'd been away, and I thought I should do my military service. So I thought: What a brilliant idea! This way I can go back to Turkey but I don't have to decide; I can postpone my decision.'

It was while doing military service that Ceylan read Roman Polanski's autobiography. It fired him up. 'I began to think: Maybe I could go into filmmaking. So I started reading books about cinematography. And I came back to London, to study at film school. But it was very expensive, so I went back to Turkey and studied there for two years. But after that it took another ten years to get started – starting out is the most difficult thing of all.'

Ceylan is undoubtedly one of the most distinctive filmmakers to have emerged in recent years. His first two features – 'The Small Town' and 'Clouds in May' – had already impressed audiences at various festivals before 'Uzak' ('Distant') won both the Grand Prix and Best Actor prizes in Cannes in 2003. Last year, he returned there with 'Climates' – so honest, insightful, witty and wise a study of a relationship on the rocks that Time Out had no hesitation in selecting it for our gala screening at the London Film Festival last October.

The film's wry melancholy, its dramatic and psychological subtlety, its remarkably assured, intimate sense of scale (Ceylan never yields to the temptation of hyperbole) will be familiar to anyone who saw 'Uzak' or the earlier work; what's new in 'Climates' is the detail afforded by his shooting on high definition digital video for the first time. Breathtakingly beautiful, the meticulous images remain as richly resonant as those in his earlier work, yet make you realise how few filmmakers have so far responded imaginatively to the possibilities offered by digital technology.

Then again, Ceylan – like Isa, the character he plays in 'Climates' (Bahar, his girlfriend, is played by Ceylan's wife Ebru) – is himself a photographer. His work in that medium is hugely impressive – razor-sharp wide-format landscapes and portraits shot with a digital panoramic camera, then printed on cotton rag paper using archival pigment inks so they look more like paintings than photos. They're a revelation and many can be seen in 'Turkey Cinemascope' at the National Theatre, a remarkable exhibition of landscapes and portraits shot while Ceylan was seeking locations for 'Climates'.

For Ceylan, small really is beautiful. Hence a preference for keeping the crew tiny, casting family members as actors, and making movies about characters not so different from himself. 'I'd meant for a while to make a film about a man-woman relationship. One day when I was having breakfast with Ebru, some ideas came up that we discussed, and over the next day or so they just developed. She generally helps me a lot, through the whole filmmaking process – and not just by acting.'

The film explores male-female interaction with an often painful honesty; wasn't it difficult to play some scenes together?

'In many ways it made things easier, as Ebru knows me so well. Also, when I'm shooting, I like to talk a lot to the cast, give plenty of direction, but here, because I was acting, I couldn't do that, so it made sense to cast Ebru; I knew I could trust her. She'd appeared in 'Uzak' of course; actually, I'd intended to act in that film too, but didn't. This time, however, I had the courage to do it, probably because we were using HiDef.'

Usually, Ceylan shoots his films himself; this time, because he was acting, he hired a DoP, but gave him extremely precise instructions. 'There was a monitor, so I'd show him exactly what I wanted; we did the lighting, framing, everything together. With HiDef you can control everything in the camera and see the results on set; if you want to change the colour or focus, you do it there and then. I'm a bit of a control freak, so that suited me well.'

Despite the film having plenty of bone-dry humour – mainly focused on the games people play and the lies they tell each other and themselves – it's also, like its predecessors, rather pessimistic, boasting a far from fully sympathetic male protagonist and shifting from sun to snow. Indeed, I suggest, the climates motif takes us from summer through autumn to winter – but never reaches rebirth in spring.

Ceylan laughs. 'Right – though someone told me spring is included, because the girl's name, Bahar, is also the Turkish word for spring. I'd never even noticed! As for Isa not being very sympathetic, I like to show a character's weaknesses as well as their strengths; that’s just the way I am, so people may not like my characters much.'

Which brings us inevitably to the question: how autobiographical is 'Climates'? He laughs again. 'Not at all, really, though I've had the kinds of feelings Isa has. When I write and try to construct a reality, of course I look into my own soul; if I find something in me, I imagine it's probably there in other people too. Maybe I'm wrong to assume that, but I do.'

'Turkey Cinemascope' is at the National Theatre. 'Climates' opens on Feb 9.

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