“When I realised that you can make films about everything, I began to use cinema to look inward. I look at my soul, my problems, and ask what is more important to me. I still ask the same questions to myself everyday,” Nuri Bilge Ceylan says in his deep commanding voice, perhaps giving the best introduction to his oeuvre, filled with deeply personal films in which unseen recesses of the characters are revealed bit by bit in long conversations and uncomfortable silences.
In an interview to The Hindu , the Turkish master, who is the chief guest of this year’s IFFK, said that cinema happened for him as an extension of photography.
“I started photography as a 15-year-old, shooting black and white mostly. My first film Kasaba was a reflection of this love for black and white images. Cinema happened when I realised that photography is not equipped enough to go deep inside. But those days, cinema was very difficult as it was in the hands of a small privileged class. I never knew them and I thought the medium was beyond me,” he says.
It was at 16 that he watched the kind of cinema that he wanted to make. “I fell in love with Bergman’s Silence and films by Ozu. Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy is also important to me. Till then, I thought cinema was something else.”
Out of his teens, Ceylan spent a few years drifting across countries, including India and Nepal, with cinema still not in the horizon. Back in Turkey, he signed up for military service.
“That year-and-a half was an important phase in my life. I was living an anarchist life till then and I needed some kind of obligation. Meeting a mix of people from every corner of Turkey created a new love for the home country. I read a lot of books during that period and more importantly, I decided to make movies.”
The influence of the Russian literary masters shines through in his recent works, be it in Once upon a time in Anatolia or this year’s Cannes winner Winter Sleep , which draws from Anton Chekhov’s stories. “Chekhov and Dostoevsky influenced my filmmaking. But Gorky is not for me, neither did Tolstoy manage to touch me”
For someone coming from a politically volatile country such as Turkey, Ceylan’s films do not have any visible commentary on politics. But, at times he has made public statements, like this year in Cannes, when he dedicated the award to “all the young people who lost their lives this year in Turkey”, referring to the Gezi park protests.
“I don’t like to make statements, as I am not really sure of anything. Sometimes when journalists ask about these, you have to say something,” he said.