Welcome. You recently finished a short film (The Daughters of Fire) and are currently working on a new film. How is it going?
Well, I am preparing it. This film is a bit different from the others because it will have a lot of music and a lot of singing, and the songs and the music must be written and even recorded before we start shooting, so this film is a bit more planned and prepared than the others in the sense that there is a script. Let’s say it’s a musical script; there are some songs and continuity and musical continuity, and we’ll have to follow that.
You write the song texts before, and will the songs be performed on location or before shooting?
They will be performed; well, the singing will be live, direct, and the music will be recorded before. Singers will listen to a new piece of music; they will sing it, and we will record the song. In the end, we will put both things together. That’s the way to do it, or you could do it in playback, which is what most people do, so they mimic the singing, but they don’t sing, and then in the studio, after they do the actual scene, we prefer to do it direct sound.
So, will it be a very clean recording at the end, very smooth, when you mix it together?
Yeah, well, but that singing will be more; it will be direct, so it will have all the surrounding sounds of the places where the people are singing: cars and planes and all the ambient sounds. So, it’s much more difficult to do it this way; smooth and clean, it would be playback, and with all in studio, this will be much more risky because we will probably have to stop because of, I don’t know, traffic or airplanes, or I don’t know, dogs or something, when it’s annoying because it could be nice also, but it’s a very difficult process for everybody, for the crew, for the singers, for everybody. So, I am now trying to choose the locations also because of this, the condition of the sound in certain places; even if the place is nice, if it’s too noisy, we will not be able to do it there, so we have to choose something else. That’s one of the problems of this film.
And will the film be shot in Lisbon?
Not only. Well, it’s a story that happens in three different locations, very different, it’s not only Lisbon.
Firs of all, we would like to do an introduction with Jean-Marie Straub. The great master who inspired the name of our website Othon Cinema. We know that he has a special meaning for you too. We would like to hear a little bit about Straub from you.
I saw some of their films when I was quite young, and it’s very strange because we could see those films, for instance, “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach”. I remember seeing it on television; I think it was Easter, and the people on TV probably thought it was good religious music, so Easter and Easter Sunday, I remember seeing that when I was really a teenager, or even before. But it was sometimes we could see his films on TV, on public TV, some of them, not all, and then later, I think I got to Godard through some friends, I had older friends that were a bit more into cinema than I was. I was completely into music, going with a band, but I had also a few friends, older, much older, that wanted to be a filmmaker, they were working in film, and slowly, they told me about Godard first, then I think I discovered Straub through Godard and interviews and things, and then when I went to film school, it was the 1980s, that was a very strong period where the two main filmmakers, the two main forces, that counted, that were important in filmmaking, were Godard and Straub. And in my film school in 1979 and 1980, after the revolution of 1974, this film school was still under the sort of energy that came from the revolution, and all the filmmakers and the films revolved very much around Godard, Straub, Raul Ruiz, Manoel Oliveira, Glauber Rocha, Paulo Rocha, Rivette. At that time this contemporary cinema was more exciting. And one of the teachers that I had was called António Reis; he was a filmmaker too, Portuguese, and he was close to Straub because he made a film called “Trás-os-Montes”, a very important film here for all of us. He was a great, great teacher, a great master, and it happens that Jean-Marie and Danièle and Jean Rouch and Marguerite Duras had seen this film by our teacher, and they all loved it very much. Jean Rouch wrote a beautiful text, and Rivette also, so it happens that all these people were connected; they all admired more or less each other. Straub made a film, very short, around a piece by Marguerite Duras. Rivette was the person that Straub most admired. Rouch and Straub and Rivette were very close. Godard was a bit apart, but we all admire Godard, so it was a small gang, and that had something to do with the comradeship and the solidarity that I used to know from music. It was, at that time, almost a terrorist gang inside cinema. Everybody was against them, against those films. Nobody, not even Manoel Oliveira here, understood why he was doing the films he did. He was very obstinate, very stubborn, and had strong ideas of his own, like the others. So they all seemed very strong to me. I always thought that their films but even those directors as characters were very close to some rock stars that I used to like. Not the Rolling Stones, but the more marginal punk bands, Wire, The Clash or Sex Pistols. They all, Jean-Marie, could easily be in there.
Pedro Costa, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
So, it was like a kind of Rock ‘n’ Roll inside cinema?
The attitude, not the posing, there’s an attitude or an energy that you really have to have. Not to give up because at that time you also have to understand that there was a lot of misunderstandings and it was very much a minority; it was a thing for a very small group of people, few people, so let’s say the other cinema, the commercial cinema, like Jean-Marie used to say, fought them with all the weapons. But at that time there was something that well, it still exists today in another form: criticism. Criticism was very important, the writing, and there were great writers. Of course, he met all those French critics, some in England, some in Germany. There was the magazine “Filmkritik”. I didn’t read German, but I knew they existed, you know, Farocki and all the people in Germany, all the people in Italy, even in the United States, a few of them, like Jonathan Rosenbaum. There was a support, you know, for these people, for the cinema, and even the writers had the same attitude. A minority, a few people against everything, but they were very explosive, very special. There is something that Marguerite Duras said that is very beautiful. She talked about some commercial filmmaker in the seventies or eighties, a big one, like Kubrick, and she said, yes, that guy has three thousand spectators in the cinema, and I have three. But my three spectators, he will never have, and that tells a lot about the special nature and the attitude of even the spectators that had a very punkish attitude. If we liked Straub or Godard, we were against everything else. We didn’t need to see the other things; we just didn’t like them.
So there was an alliance between film critics and filmmakers and the audience, all working together.
Yeah, that existed; I felt it, but it was a different time. It’s completely dead and forgotten. I remember when I made my first few films, when I went to my first film festival, festivals were growing. They were already big and commercial and a circus and everything, but I still remember, for instance, the Rotterdam Film Festival. In Rotterdam, I remember that I met all the filmmakers there. I met Straub and Danièle there, I met Raúl Ruiz, I met Philippe Garrel, I met a lot of them, and it was just a table. There were maybe around thirty people, and that was it; that was all the guests, and the guests were these people that I am telling you, plus Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Béla Tarr, and that was all. And the film critics and the audience, everything was on the same wavelength, let’s say. Now it’s different. There’s a certain violence I feel, in the sense that there’s more selection. The politics of this thing has completely changed.
We want to ask you about that in another question, so then the next question is more about your filmmaking process. I mean, you’ve been making films for a long time, and we noted in the beginning, just with the camera and minimal means. But have you now established a certain process of how to make your films, or is every new film that you make still a challenge. Do you feel like you now have all the possibilities when you make something?
No, with this film I am preparing I am a bit afraid, and I am always afraid anyway, but with the music it’s difficult. It can be dangerous having a lot of music in the film. The way we do it is singing, of course, but we have to work on it. But I started doing films in a very normal way. My three first films were very conventionally made, and then I had to think because I was not happy with the way I was making films, the way I was living, and so, in a way, I was not happy with cinema in general. So, I had to find a way, and slowly it took me three films over a lot of years, to find a way so that both things could be together, making films and living. You know, all of your economy is not only the money, it’s your feelings, it’s your nervous tension. You know, I thought that when I was doing films in a conventional way, like everybody, when you do a film, it’s a very special moment, everything is more acute, it’s like a fever, you have to be very concentrated, like in a state of fever. It’s not only concentration, you have to be excited and almost in a loving state. But I think you need to be like that all the time, so not too high, rather a little bit low, but all the time. That’s my idea, and not to be so fantastically romantic for six weeks but all your life. So I thought, I have to be like this all my life, every day. So I have to change something, and I thought, I have to change the economy, the production, the way of doing, so the money. Not the ideas, not the artistic ideas. So that’s what I found, I tried to find another way, and it’s actually quite simple to find it because I just thought that Straub and Godard and Rouch, all the filmmakers I love and admire, they are also producers. They are not only filmmakers. Jean-Marie and Danièle produce their films, they did a planning for every day with the money, they planned how much to pay the crew, and so they were inventing a way of producing for their films. Godard the same, Rouch the same, there’s a lot of them, and I thought, I can do this, it’s very easy. The problem is, I will probably go out of a certain system, commercial system, or the conventional system, and I did. And also because I was going out and into a very dangerous place. People told me that I’m going into a very dangerous place, dark and full of crazy people and junkies and bandits and robbers. And this was the neighbourhood where I was every day, it was like a clash. I went out of certain cinema and into a place that gave me other things, gave me much more. So I could be there, live there, enjoy myself, and see things, and transform this scene into a project, a film project. At the beginning I thought this might not even be a documentary, just notes for photos, a sort of collage of things, maybe it’s not a film. Maybe it’s just a study of history and sociology. So it could be just notes on a place and people, how they live, and so I followed this.
If you think about your trilogy, Ossos, In Vanda’s Room, and Colossal Youth, do you think it was easier with each following film? The process that you learned from the past films and the production became, in a way, let’s say, more efficient or established, or was each film a new challenge, and there was no evolving of an established process?
No, I mean, I imagine that for every film, every filmmaker, it’s different. If you interview Ridley Scott, he is a man who has no fear, and all the big men. I know I am not a man; I am a child, I am a woman. You know, this kind of filmmakers, there are more and more of this kind of filmmakers. They have to conquer something; they are only doing films to conquer, to gain. Once I said, I am doing these films to forget and to lose. It’s, of course, abstract to say this, but sometimes you have that feeling that you’re losing a lot; you have to lose a lot of things too, to really get to a point where you are happier, but that has to do again with not only the project but your own sentimental economy, the politics of yourself, of your head and body. I mean, who do you like to be with? And that comes from the films. I was lucky. I think I saw the films that I saw well. I think so when I saw films by John Ford or Eisenstein. It made me choose my friends, the way I arrange my house, everything. It builds you. These films are made to build you. One of Dreyer’s films, you could see that for the rest of your life because it will be with you, and it will tell you things. You really have to watch them well and not be distracted, and that’s one of the things that today is different. Because there are much more films than before in contemporary cinema, and even for critics, there’s a sort of hunger and anxiety to see everything, and it was not like this.
The people feel that they need to know what’s been shown at all the festivals to have an overview, and it’s just too much; there’s no focus on single works.
Yeah, so it’s very pathetic because probably some film critic somewhere is completely excited and amazed by some first short film from Romania or China, and then they watch twenty minutes of Jean Epstein and see this existed in 1920. They see a little bit of Boris Barnet and are surprised and say, “Nobody told me about this.” Because there’s a lot of ignorance today, except in a few smaller circles.
Ignorance towards the past, you mean towards cinema history?
It’s not even towards the past, I think we need to see the things that were made before us, of course, but I am talking more from the point of view of a filmmaker, one who works and tries to build something, work on a shot or something, necessarily you will be reminded of something. It happens every day; you think up this point of view, this house, and this street, and you try to study that space, and then you imagine how your characters will walk in or walk out, and at some point, when you are thinking about that, and you can be super focused on your thing, but in the middle of that, for a microsecond, something will come, and that will be something you saw, that had an influence, that had some power. That could be Barnet or Eisenstein or Renoir, just a glimpse of something that he’s already made, and you think it’s, it’s well-made, so yeah. But I think I share the opinion that great films, you can study great films like great books or great paintings, you can study them. What’s changing now with film studies or universities, I think, is that the film studies have become a bit fake. I have proof of this. Sometimes I bring with me to some workshops or places just a text by Jacques Rivette, and I tell young people to read it instead of reading some contemporary university thesis about space and time in Tarkovsky. I tell them to just read this text by Rivette about a hand in a film by Fritz Lang, I just tell them to try to read it. And they are a bit confused, and they think the text is too difficult, and that there are a lot of things in the text that they don’t know. They always say the same thing: we have to know a lot of things to read this text. That’s what they say about my films, and that’s what they were told about Straub. First, we have to know a lot of things and read so that we can see this film, and this is very demagogical. It stops a lot of things because it’s not true. If Rivette is writing, you have to be with him, and of course, you have to be curious to know what he’s talking about, which films, which books sometimes. But that’s a life; you have to be inside and not outside, I think. Being inside cinema today, it’s different from what it was. It seems to me it’s more a job for university people and teachers. For filmmakers, I don’t know, I don’t meet many, but things changed a lot, and I feel the danger of ignorance. You’re Othon, and Jean-Marie and Danièle are here, and I am very afraid that ten years from now, nobody will know who they were. Godard, will stay because it’s another plane. But Straub or Jean Rouch, Rivette, these people will be forgotten very, very quickly.
We try to translate their texts into Turkish and at least keep them in memory here somehow.
Yeah, you know, there’s you, there are some guys in Denmark or Sweden that made a magazine, there are some people everywhere, but it’s not enough. And there is a strange notion that never disappeared. When I started seeing Straub, the notion was they’re very difficult. They are very Marxist-Leninist; they are very strict; they are very Stalinist. Well, I didn’t care about that, so I saw the films, I knew them, I worked with them, and today they are gone. And the old idea is coming back: Oh, it’s too difficult, it’s – I don’t even say Marxist-Leninist because you can go to jail, but the same thing is coming back, the same prejudice.
And you need too much background knowledge of the texts they’re referring to, the literature.
For me Straub is much simpler than other things. Of course, I don’t like to compare, but his cinema seems to be much more direct. I mean, there are people saying things in a certain context, and this context is always very natural. Actually, most of the time, it’s open air, mountain, or flowers, or trees, and the winds, and butterflies, and things like that; there’s nothing else. So, you recognize that you don’t have to imagine that much, and especially, you don’t have to interpret, to make an interpretation, which you have to do in most films, you have to recognize some symbols or metaphors or things like that.
Too Early / Too Late (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1981)
You mean it’s an immediate experience?
I think it’s very direct cinema. I think it’s very direct for me. There’s no filter. You know, with a camera, you put a filter and then another one, another, so that your image will be softer or more brilliant or some other color. Straub and Danièle don’t have filters; they are as close to what’s in front of the camera as possible. They used very little means, especially in the end; they never used too many lights, or only very small lights.
The next question is of a more practical nature. What kind of advice would you give filmmakers who just take the camera with very little means and go out and try to shoot something and try to follow in your footsteps?
I mean, actually, Dziga Vertov said, and Griffith said, you have to watch, see, and hear first, see and hear, see the things, see them again, see them a third time, hear, hear all the sounds, be quiet, be simply facing a situation, or do it like Jacques Tati used to do. When he prepared a film, he went out, and he sat on a bench in the street. And that’s Tati’s films, as you know. Everybody says, in the morning, he walked out, and he sat on that bench in some street, and he spent an hour watching, and he would go to a park, and he did the same thing. It seems very lazy and like a luxury, but it’s actually the work of a filmmaker, to watch and to hear, and then to think. But when you think, I think you should distrust your first idea, because there’s always the first idea; it is super exciting. I think you should be cautious and test that idea and maybe do not follow that first idea, wait for a second idea, wait for that first idea to go away because it was not interesting enough. And then, if you want to turn this watching and hearing and thinking into cinema, I think there’s a lot of things you need, actually. Today, you need to be very smart, not really intelligent, but smart. And you have to take sides. You have really to choose your side, and that I don’t see enough.
But what do you mean by sides? In what terms do you have to pick a side?
Just go to any festival or any meeting. There is one happening now maybe in Turkey, maybe here, maybe in Dubai, maybe in New York. And there’s a bunch of young filmmakers. They all bought their plane tickets. There’s a bunch of older guys and women that are sort of mentors, university people, producers that don’t really produce anymore, agents. Sales agents, I would say parasites, but it’s me being nasty again, but just agents. And what would they do? They pitch, you know the word pitching?
Pitching to the audience, they’re pitching their idea.
That’s what you have to do today to get financed for a film. You have to tell what you want to do, and I’m completely against that because you get lost in things when you tell your film. You get lost in your own discourse, your own fascination. It’s bad, and the film should be a secret between you and very few people, or between you and the space, you know, it’s that forest, it’s that girl, it’s that man, it should be between you, and it’s very intimate, and it’s a part of secrecy. The pitching idea, method, or politics of pitching is killing a lot of things for those projects; it’s obvious, and then you go into a system which is the normal, conventional, commercial, capitalistic way of making a film. Financing and thinking through the discourse around these things. I never thought it would get to this, to this awful place that it got to. They ask you about your goals with this film. When I was young, I never thought about goals, and when they say goals, you have to apply for money for your film. You have to write a text about not only how you plan to finance the film but also about who the film is addressing, how many countries, for how many, what sort of market, etcetera. So the world market is there almost at the beginning of a young filmmaker’s life, and it should not be there. And it’s not there when you pick up your iPhone. If you have a video camera or a digital camera and you go out, like you say, alone, it can be a great film, it can be a film made by just one person or two or three or four. And the problem is to show it. It’s YouTube or Vimeo, but it won’t go far, I think.
But that would be my next question. If you reject all this system, and the pitchings, and this festival environment, you still want to reach an audience with your film, and you may become invisible if you stay outside the system, because after all, you want to reach people. So, what would be the way out?
It’s a vicious circle and it has everything to do with cinema, but it has everything to do with the kind of life and organization of our society. I mean, everything is thinking towards a market, towards profit. Everything must sell, in films too, so if you do something that doesn’t sell, you’re out. So, of course, that makes a young filmmaker very nervous, and you should not be nervous about those kinds of things. I think more and more films need a little bit of the public. They always needed the public; projects need to be correctly judged and not by this market. They need to be judged by people with eyes and ears and feelings again, and there are still people that can do this. It’s very terrifying because most of the films I see suffer from something they lost in the pitching. I mean, the first idea that you have to make a film, it’s very intimate, it’s sometimes something you are ashamed to tell your girlfriend or boyfriend. It’s also, it makes you shiver, it’s very fragile. You think: Is this really nice? Is it what I think? Is this my idea? You know, there are a lot of things that you have to balance. To sell this first idea immediately… No, you should write it down and apply for public funding in your country. You should try to do that or see some rich guys, I don’t know, television or try to make films – and that would be, I think, my solution – with people that are close to you, like when you do a magazine or a fanzine, try to get two or three people and do it very local, not small; it can be a big film with big ideas and extraordinary mise-en-scène. But do it at your own scale. There’s something that happens in festivals and these kinds of round tables for financing, which had already happened to Straub, and he talked about that already in his days. You need a certain amount of money to do your film. If you get more, you should spend it on people. I mean, giving people money, not buying other things. All the young producers today seem to me junkies, money junkies, financing junkies. If you’re a young Turkish producer, it must be exactly like a young Portuguese producer. Their drug is financing; it’s like heroin. It is this and this and this. And there’s a Dutch fund and there’s a Swedish fund and there’s another fund, and they get lost in this because the film doesn’t need that much because the film maybe needs a million, and they are up to five million. So everything got lost there. It’s a strange operation because there’s a lot of money around; there are a lot of ways of getting it, and in fact, that does not serve the film, the economy of the film. Jean-Marie Straub told in the film I made about him that he told his producer when he was making the film about Bach he made a budget and the film will cost this. And the producer that saw the budget said: No, I will give you double the amount. And Straub asked: What for? And there was no answer because the money was not for Straub and Danièle; he just wanted to say I will get you double. The producer will get some money, of course, because the people who get the money get the percentage. And then probably for stars or for better conditions, hotels, and things like that. Things that you don’t need when you make a film. So I think the solution would be to have a crew where everybody gets the same money, all the people, even the director. Try to increase the wages a bit. If you can’t do it, then reduce the wage gap to the minimum gap possible. There are a lot of things you can do, but it’s a sacrifice today. You will lose a lot of things. Maybe you’ll lose some friends, and you will be outside of a system.
It’s a kind of loneliness.
Yeah, that is good because I think you will be closer to your own loneliness. In fact, you’ll be closer to yourself. I just think you lose a lot of yourself in this kind of meetings, but I can be wrong. You lose a lot, I mean you waste a lot, and you get used to formalities, convenience, saying hello, let’s talk about this, and there’s a lot of talking about the films. It’s not even theoretical; it’s talking blah blah, it’s a waste of words to make a film.
Vitalina Varela (2019)
So maybe we can ask a few questions about your films and your idea of cinema. One question would be about storytelling. What role does storytelling play in your films? Specifically, in relation to the films shot in Fontaínhas in Lisbon, we would like to ask: How do you plan your creative process? Do you go into the neighborhood and to the people without a pre-planned story and look for ideas through observation and conversation that can then be transformed into a story, or is your intervention minimal when it comes to storytelling?
Just one question: Do you do make films or do you want to make films too?
Yes.
Okay, because there is a thinking when you want to make films that already shifts a little bit from just writing about films. There’s another set of things in your head that shift. In the beginning, I thought that most of the story or the stories should come from me, from my head, my imagination, my taste. I would be the author, and the writer, and the director, and then slowly, that was one of the problems when I shifted. It’s that even if I was the author and I wrote things, scenes, etc., when I got to the making of the film, I had no time to work out what I had thought. So I was all the time in panic, because I was seeing that I was losing everything. I didn’t know how to do it, so I had to compromise, and I thought about something else, and I had no more time, we had to go to another scene, etcetera. It was a big problem for me to be so afraid, so in panic. And I thought that this panic was something that I had to also fight. So slowly, this approach to another kind of making led me to the extreme opposite, which is, I think, what you can say it’s more a documentary approach. I mean, you are interested in something, reality, somebody, or a lot of people, or a place, or a situation, a story, and you go there, and you watch, and you see, and you hear, and you think, and you stay, and if you are really interested in that, I think your mind will start absorbing that story. But when I say story or this notion of story, it can be a stone, it can be a tree; the story can be a tree, we have all seen films that are like that. I mean, the stories in Jean-Marie Straub’s films are everywhere, they are not only in the words, they are behind, in front, it’s the story of humanity. So if you think that the story can begin on a stone, on a simple stone on your way, then you have a lot of work and wonders to resolve, let’s say. I decided not to write, I take some notes, of course, but I do not write scripts anymore and do it without filters, like I said, watching, and then letting through just observation and patience, and just being there, the being there is very important for me, being there with someone, being there in that space, it’s like living there. So if you’re interested in that, the film will be, I think, more solid because it’s your house, it’s your home. It’s studying the space but studying in a nice way, of course, it involves effort and difficulty, but you should not be afraid of this study because it is finding. And the finding will be in front of you, in front of your eyes and your ears, that’s what happened to me, and it was much more interesting and exciting and funny and everything, then making a film. Making a film for five weeks with the crew and all the conventions, it was an absolute nightmare, and I’m sure it’s still the same. And I couldn’t deal with it, the conventions bring a lot… The conventions are a mirror of all the situations we see in our society. I mean, a film crew is a very ugly thing to see. It’s competition, it’s dispute, it’s separation. It is a hierarchy of competences, talents. Even worse things, like we are discussing today. The film crews are the place where all the most awful, obnoxious behaviors are in practice. I mean, it’s very easy, the actors, the actresses, the fake love, those kinds of things that you know, the love that the director has for his actors, his actresses, sometimes. Now we’re seeing what happens; I mean, it’s so awful. So, all this system has functions because there is a scenario behind and a budget behind. And those things, you can get rid of easily. Your scenario should be reality, and you should trust a little bit in reality because without that, you cannot make films, I think. Other people think that they can create amazing things in front of the camera. I don’t. I think that when you turn on your camera, it’ll be you, both of you, and that lamp, and that’s what I see. Or what you see of me, that wall, etcetera, it’s reality. And then we can study the space, that house, who comes in, who comes out, what’s the story, but not writing it. And the budget would be, I mean, you would be comfortable with something like the minimum to pay your crew, let’s say, your friends. That’s what I do all the time. This film now is a bit more difficult because of the singing and the musicians, but it’s not that far. When I have the money that I think allows me to pay the people, I will then cut somewhere else if I don’t have the money. Equipment, I don’t need that much… I try not to pay for, you know, spaces; I will always find something for free, inventing something.
But how do you approach montage, because after all, if you capture reality, you have lots of material, and at the end, you have to pick?
No, that is a very strange thing that’s been happening. You’re not the first guy that asked me this or makes that comment because not only do you think I shoot a lot, but you think that it’s very difficult to choose. First, I now have this formula that I think is very good, and Istanbul is a very touristic city, so when you see those Japanese and those Russians with their iPhones – I was going to say cameras – but they easily do three, four hours a day shooting around Istanbul. So, in one week, they will have hours and hours of things they shot, they recorded, they captured. That’s also what a filmmaker does, they record, they capture. It’s digital; you can erase. I mean, it’s not like with film. With film, you had some tension, you’re a bit nervous if you didn’t do it in that take. In the old days, back when I gave interviews, and I talked about In Vanda’s room, I said I had in the end 190 hours. That’s nothing today. I mean, it’s really zero. It’s just zero. At that time, I was one of the first. Lars von Trier was shooting on video. I was one of the first, and at that time, it was easy. I mean, there were tapes, it was already very cheap, and I was in the process of searching, I was shooting everything, I was walking around with a camera, and my eyes would be interested in something, and the camera would follow, so I had no problem with that, with money for that. I had problems to pay people; I wanted to pay the people I was shooting. But I didn’t have the money, so that was another problem. So, 190 hours or something at that time, scenes. But today, it’s nothing. I mean, every filmmaker, sometimes I read things, and they have 300 and 400 hours. That’s because they have small three or four cameras most of the times; they shoot with three or four cameras, or they never stop, you know, that in American films or something, they never stop. It’s always running, I mean, just put your clap, and then go out, but it’s like sound. You know, it’s recording. So, it’s just there. The only thing that I’m worried about today is the actors. So, for the next film, it will be the singers and actors. If they are up there where I think, and they think they can go the best possible way, or should we work a little bit more? We have to work; we have to spend more time and more digital material. The problem with shooting this way, I mean, working this way, is that you can end up with a lot of material. That was Jean-Marie and Danièle’s problem too. You can have a lot of good takes because you worked with your actors well; you got to somewhere that you both like, and then you try to go a little bit more up there or try something else, and you have ten takes. You know, ten takes that are good, so that’s a problem because you choose one you think it’s the best, but you’re not sure, and then you have eight or ten more takes that are as good, and you suffer a little bit for your actors because they worked so much, and the other takes will go away. You can keep them, but they will not be seen. That’s the only problem with shooting. But financially, it’s not a problem. The problem is the way you work.
In Vanda’s Room (2000)
But when you shot 190 hours for In Vanda’s Room, how do you decide what comes into the film?
In my case, I’m not shooting that randomly. One of the things in the beginning, when you’re serious about the film, is that you’re going to limit yourself. You cannot do everything; sometimes, you have an idea that seems very nice, and everybody likes it, and then you talk with your crew or friends, and everybody agrees that it’s not possible for some reason. So, this process of condensing or reducing, of limitations, is something you have to do. It’s good; it’s the best because usually, you find the best things when you limit yourself. It’s not a Ridley Scott thing; it’s the opposite, so you should do the opposite of Ridley Scott, always at every second. And if you do that, you will have material that, when you get to the editing room, will not be there by chance, I hope. It’s there because you worked well, and you got to some places with your actors, and then you have to organize it in a certain form. And that form, I don’t think you can find it in editing. I think the form has to be in the material already, and I know that because in the film “In Vanda’s Room”, which was the film that probably makes you think that the order of it could be very different, that the form and place could change, we experienced that. We did the first editing, which is always very bad for every filmmaker, and you will watch it and say, my god, this is awful, and it’s super long and super boring, and it doesn’t move, and there’s nothing. And then you don’t know why or how you should do it. I stopped; we all took some vacation, a small vacation, and then we got back, and we started again, and we just followed something very simple, which was to follow the people, the characters, and not ourselves, not our judgment on the thing. Just follow the things they said really, and we thought we are not hearing them, we are not really seeing, hearing them. We started hearing the little things they said, and we found continuity, or we found a story, probably, or some stories, and what we really found was that the film was there. It was there, and there was no other form, I think. I don’t think if I went back that I would find another structure. I think it’s the same for every film; if you go back to your film, you cannot find another structure. If the film is edited like it’s supposed to be, it’s that form. It’s not another one; you cannot do another version, you know.
One other question is about the difference, the differentiation between fiction and documentary. We know that in other interviews, you said you don’t like this differentiation, but why do you think that it’s still there, this differentiation, every evaluation of a film is either documentary or fiction?
It’s even becoming more, but that’s in the film studies field. I mean, people have to work on something. If they don’t have that, what would they do in universities? Study the esoteric things they do sometimes? I am not saying this is esoteric, but it’s not very useful for when you’re making a film. It could be useful, like in the sense that you can pick when you see documentaries on TV or in festivals. They are much more chic and gourmet, and just look at the credits, five hundred producers, lots of sponsors, and the crews. I once saw a short film, and the credits were longer than the film. The film was two minutes, and the credits were three minutes. There used to be something good in documentaries, which was the spirit. In a documentary, I think you are a bit more generous towards what you’re going to film, towards your crew, you’re a bit more loose, and you have a bit more freedom inside of a documentary frame. Usually, you don’t have a script, and by script, I mean something you have to follow. In the old days, you didn’t have a budget. You used to have a very small budget, and you had to do a nice film with that small amount of money. Today, it’s much different; you have a very strict budget, and you do with that. So, a documentary should be nicer, a nicer way to approach reality, let’s say. I’m not sure today of that. I think every crew, documentary or film, is an army, a military army that wants to do harm. And to think about that differentiation, I don’t know, I think if you are into documentary, you will soon or later realize you need a little bit of fiction to make your film be a bit more interesting and true sometimes. Reality is not enough. And I say, you have to be interested in reality and conscious. That’s what will be in your camera, in your film. I think you have to put in this reality a little bit of fantasy.
Some intervention on the material?
I don’t know if it’s intervention; it’s very organic when you’re working. It’s not explainable. They’re working with someone and ask them to tell their story, and this person tells you their story, and you’re fascinated and say, “Oh, this is going to be a great film.” And she talks for hours and hours, and then you say, “This cannot be; I have to reduce. Tell me just that part,” and then you start to intervene, to organize. “Don’t tell me about your father; tell me about that part when you got lost or something.” So you start to arrange things; that’s necessary. And when you start doing that, it’s yourself in the film, so it’s a little piece of your biography too.
Every question is somehow determined by our own history.
Yeah, sure, if you give something to real people, I think real people will give to you and to the film a little bit of fantasy. We should trust that. It will be a payback in small amounts of what we call fiction. I mean fantasy or something dreamy, a little bit of a dreamy situation. But you have to have time, you know, you really have to create your time for that to happen because if you rush, if you want to capture, and the problem I think with documentary – this idea of catching reality like it is – is again being hungry, you’re hungry so you try to catch it all the time. Look, look, look, it’s like candid cameras, you know, let’s catch reality at any cost. It’s a kind of urgency, the urgency is the worst thing with documentaries. Take it slowly and wait.
Colossal Youth (2006)
And one question out of curiosity, after you made so many films in the Fontainhas neighborhood in Lisbon, how did your personal relationship change with the people living there, from the first time you came there and after the many films? Did you become part of that community, or are you still viewed as an outsider? How were you viewed there over time by the people?
You have to understand that when you say “these people,” this neighborhood, or this place, like in Istanbul or Turkey or everywhere in the world, it’s not a fixed thing, you know. Everybody says “that people.” That people does not exist, you know; it exists in my mind and yours and theirs too. But the community of human beings, it’s something that moves, that is movable, even more when the people are poor. Poor people have to keep moving; we have to keep moving; we have to move, we have to change and go somewhere else, and we probably do that because we feel we need to do it. They have to; they are forced to, you know. They are forced, like immigrants, to move, to cross the ocean, to cross the Mediterranean, to walk around Russia, or to come south or go north. They need to escape. So these people had to move a lot, so that neighborhood, even inside the neighborhood, as you probably saw, people were always moving, escaping. Even in “In Vanda’s Room”, which is a film that takes place in a room, they are very still, but the idea was to feel that they wanted to escape and to run away, or there was a lot of movement, and there’s always a lot of movement inside these communities. So the neighborhood was destroyed; they went into another one, and when they went into this other one, they got separated. The community got dissolved a little bit. Even myself, I contact more people, some people more than others, so the situation has changed for the worse, I think. Because for them, the community got lost a little bit. There’s no more togetherness, no more solidarity; many things are lost. I don’t see the whole; I see some friends a lot, all the time. And the films are something else, you know, they are probably, like this one I’m going to do, they are more abstract, probably. This one is closer to music. It took a lot of films to get to a point where we are moving closer to, I don’t know, poetry or music or singing. So that’s a very ancient form of telling; it is in the past, in the beginning of things when people sang, or the theater and the music was very there in society. So probably, I am moving back or into a different plane because there is no more community there. You know, even the reality is strange because it seems that it’s very shattered, it’s very broken, the reality. And I don’t have an angle to see this reality anymore. I’m wondering if there are films that are watching our reality. I don’t know, in Turkey, here. Films that are serious. I don’t know; I don’t see that many films, I have to say. I don’t go to the cinema that much, but there is the internet and Karagarga. And lots of things, you see the bits and pieces, and I see what people are doing with reality and film, and I always give the same example, the example of Wang Bing. But he has China, and China is very big, so he has a lot of things to see, but apart from Wang Bing, which is a good example where the difference between documentary and fiction is a bit lost, I’m sure there are young filmmakers, especially, because the others we know, but I’m sure there are some nice things. But for me, this reality and this community, the one I used to know, is completely broken. So the films we can do now, they have to go somewhere else. I’m going back to the past and to their past, and for me, to the past of cinema, probably to the beginning, not silent cinema, but music.
We know that the Carnation revolution played a huge role in Portuguese political history. It is a subject that often comes up in your films, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly. What exactly is the impact of the revolution in your life and in your cinema?
It was something super important for everybody, of course, in this country. I was around twelve years old; young guys that I knew were sixteen or seventeen, some were eight years old; it was the most important moment in their lives; you could not escape it. And I’m not only talking about people that were on the side of this revolution, which was a left-wing movement. Because, of course, there were a lot of right-wing, and they’re coming back more and more. They’re coming back; we will have elections next Sunday, and the extreme right will almost win, which is amazing for me, of course. It’s amazing how this is possible. And an extreme right that is fighting immigration, so they are fighting the people I’m with. They are against them; they are super violent; they are very nasty. So what we lived with young people in 1974, it’s crucial; it formed us; it was something that built our characters. And for me, it was a motor, you know, suddenly it accelerated things. It was the absolute opposite of the pandemic. In the pandemic, everybody went in and closed. In this revolution, everybody went out, and everybody had to run and think and find and gather and talk and do things. And this revolution here was very close because it lasted – the popular movement – three or four years. Then, of course, like every revolution, it was assassinated more or less. But those four years, those were my teenage years. I did what I was supposed to do: fall in love, music, film, politics. Everything was at the same time, and I was super lucky because I was in the demonstration in the streets with a black flag. I had black flags, sometimes red, but I was with the black guys. And then all of us moved inside a place to see a film by John Ford, which is completely contradictory. But at the same time, you discover that John Ford made the film called “The Grapes of Wrath” and not only made a film called “Fort Apache.” And “The Grapes of Wrath” looks very much like what we were doing in the streets: fighting for the ones that have nothing. And then after the John Ford, we all came out with the black banners under our arms, and we went to somebody’s room and listen to The Clash very loud, and we discussed the film, the music, and the things we should do next week. Like form a committee for something. And this was very intense, and that’s the state of intensity of being like in love. We were in love for four years.
It was the right timing. The revolution happened at the right time for your growing up, in a way.
Yeah, cinema, music. I was lucky because sometimes people only have cinema, but we had cinema, music, politics. It was our sentimental education. You could read political things and at the same time, you were reading poetry. That’s what we liked, the poetry. And we had this music that was coming from England especially. But here, there were a lot of bands, like I’m sure in Istanbul there were lots of bands everywhere in the world in 1977-1979. It was a movement; we felt there was a kind of solidarity. And cinema had a part there, so it was a kind of cinema; it was political cinema, which doesn’t mean militant cinema. But it meant that if you’re serious, if you have an attitude, you have to be political. There was no way of not being political.
You call films that do not offer the audience the opportunity to think and dominate them as fascist films. How do you think a filmmaker can leave this space for the audience to think open when making a film?
It’s a difficult question. These kinds of words are difficult today. As I told you, outside this room where I am, the socialist party is going one way and the fascists are going the other way. And they’re normal, you know. The fascists are guys like you, no offense. It’s amazing. In my time, you have to understand it was a bit like in Russia; if we saw a fascist guy, that guy was soon to be killed by me. My purpose was to kill fascists like the guitar of Woody Guthrie. This machine kills fascists. There was cinema; it was a dream, you know, and this dream is old. It’s the dream of cinema. It’s not fascism. It’s cruelty what we do to each other. All the violent things that we do. Cinema is against that; it should be. Cinema is something that brings us together, in a way, it’s a gentle thing, it’s a peaceful thing. I think Godard said that. Images are peaceful things. They can be violent and clashing and colorful and tell about difficult things like “In Vanda’s Room”, for instance. It’s very difficult to watch that film. People refuse this film, many other films, like Straub’s films. Actually, I talked a lot with Danièle especially about why people sometimes are not prepared, or they refuse “Othon” or “The Death of Empedocles”. They refuse it. They say it’s boring, it’s theater. It’s not about that. It’s just they don’t want to think with the film. They want to be amused. Life is violent; life is a very violent thing. Cinema should not forget that, but should be something like medicine almost. I know that when I see a Straub film, I’m better. Immediately, it’s like taking a pill. I’m not saying drugs, but it can be like drugs, like aspirin. I’m better. If I see a film by Straub or by Godard or by John Ford or Mizoguchi, the moment after it’s super. And then I know I will have more ideas; it’s like feeling that I’m back. I’m sure you feel the same thing. We are here now, super stupid and awful. Then we see this film or read a book, but cinema is more punchy. You think, “I’m back”, “I’m back to myself”, “I’m back in the world I like”, back in the world I feel that could be the world for all of us. I mean, it’s the world that Straub invented and Ford. That would be our world. So that’s the fascism I’m talking about when I say fascist films that are the opposite of Straub and Ford. Of course, Ridley Scott is absolute fascism; there’s nothing there to take; you see that and you say no, I won’t take anything. Because it’s real populist, like you say in politics. He is a populist guy. He will abuse you, promise to give you everything, that you will be happy and free, etcetera.
One question about what they call slow cinema. The average shot duration in your films is quite high compared to many other films. In Colossal Youth, it is close to 80 seconds. This may cause your films to be considered “slow cinema”. What do you think about this classification and the “slow cinema” movement?
First thing we should say is that this is one of those things that used to kill Straub, especially Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle. They would be assassinated by this kind of ideas, formulas, like when people said their films are too slow or the camera doesn’t move, or it’s very static, nothing happens, it’s theater, it’s not cinema. This kind of talk. Then you tell people to see this film by Charlie Chaplin. The camera doesn’t move once, and they are very fast. Or worse, the Lumière films, you know, the first films that were made by the Lumière brothers. You watch those films, one minute, and you have a lot of things to see. You know, those films are called like A View of Istanbul from the Bridge, and you see 1915, your sea, and the city, and people walking, saying hello to the camera, and horses. And you have five thousand things to see. Each centimeter of your frame, you see new things. It’s like making shots. You select something. So, I think the slowness is in your head, it’s not in the film. If you’re a slow guy, you won’t see a lot of things. It’s like the Oscar Wilde quote, the beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Slowness, it’s in your head. I mean, I’ve never seen faster films than Straub’s. It’s too fast for me. When I was younger and with my friends when we had the guitar band, I used to tell them: we have to play faster than this film. And they would say: Ah, I see, I see. Because there’s so much, it’s the rhythm of the world, it’s the rhythm of nature, you know. Just think about the rhythms of nature if you are in front of a volcano or a mountain. I mean, it’s vertigo really, you are dizzy. So it’s the opposite. I think it was a woman that invented this slow cinema thing. That’s what they told me, some film studies person. If she had said “fast films” or “super speedy films” or “super speedy cinema” or “Speedy Gonzales cinema” or “go go go fast fast fast cute pussycat cinema”, that would be much better. “Slow cinema” doesn’t mean much. It doesn’t mean much and gives a really fake idea of what it is. Because there’s nothing faster than life. So the films we like, I think all agree, Straub and Mizoguchi, are the films that are closer to life. The films that are far away from life are, let’s say again, Ridley Scott. He lives in another world, Hollywood, Los Angeles, money, gold. He lives in champagne and things. If we live in life, it’s super fast, and those films are super fast. “Fast cinema” that is what I would go for, Straub, Béla Tarr.
Next question, you already touched upon it, about the music. We mean the relationship between music and film because most of the time in your films, the music is the music that is there, happening in reality. There’s no outside, non-diegetic music. So how do you see the relationship between music and film?
Well, until now, I was always very respectful, a little bit fearful, not afraid, and I think if you put music in your film, it’s difficult. It’s already so difficult to do a film, and then with music, and not being Jean-Luc Godard. He’s completely alone in that field of music and film; he is completely alone and unique in an absolute way. Except for Straub, in a different way, that took and worked with music and images in the most beautiful, productive, interesting, and rich way. And I’m not Godard; nobody is. And the system, the codes, the American codification, that’s gone. I mean, if you do a musical like that today, there are some attempts, “La La Land” and things like that. I don’t know. I’m not super critical of that. But I think they should have worked a bit more. But I’m not saying it’s bad. There is something interesting to be done with music, I think. That’s what music does in film; it elevates everything. It gives enchantment and gives it a sentimental dimension that is not in the image. So that’s the problem. Ridley Scott, poor guy. People like him, they put music because there’s nothing in their films. And the music will help. So if you do it, like Straub says, without music, it’s difficult. It’s what it is, or if you do it like Hong Sang-soo. We don’t need music to make you sad or happy or think or not think or follow the character or make you afraid. We don’t need that. So music can be used in another different way. Not to sell you something. But that way of working with music in film, you have to be responsible. I’m going to work with music that exists. It will not be composed; it’s songs from the past, the present. I mean, music that exists. Songs from Cape Verde, folk songs, classical songs, contemporary songs. There’s also that responsibility. I’m taking things and bringing them for myself. So my job is to make them be alive and be even stronger than they are. I mean, it’s the music that has to be strong, not the images. The images must be themselves.
Change Nothing (2009)
But the music would be an organic part of the film, something that is natural and not imposed.
There’s nothing natural in cinema. I don’t know; music will serve something, and the image will serve the music. The flow, they have to be companions, and they have to say certain things. My ambition, let’s say with this next film, is to try to show in cinematographic form something that is actually a musical form. It’s called counterpoint in music. Counterpoint is a very ancient form. It was invented by Bach, but baroque music uses counterpoint. You know, music used to be horizontal; music is played horizontally. Suddenly the vertical pattern was created. So when you hear Bach, especially, you hear a sort of dialogue. If you think about the piano. One hand can do something, and the other hand can do something else. And there’s a kind of point and counterpoint dialogue. This is interesting, and the textures become richer. Like in Bach, there’s a complexity and a fury and a life. I would like to imagine that with the film, the characters, the people, and the sound and the sort of counterpoint. The sort of dialogue. But it’s too soon to talk about that because we are working still. Take the music as a material, not like something that will be there just like a blanket. Music will not be a blanket or, you know, an accelerator. No, it’s a material like the others.
Horse Money (2014)
This question is very specific about one of your films. In “Horse Money” the elevator scene is a tremendous abstraction of time and space and perhaps one of the key points of the film. Can you tell us a little bit about the creation of this scene and its role in the film?
This scene comes from a moment; it was supposed to be something else. That film actually has a lot to do with this one I’m working on now because it was supposed to be not musical. Not musical, but have a lot of music. The first idea for “Horse Money” was to make a film all in verse, like a poem with Ventura. So Ventura would start saying something, and that would be like a very long poem, like the old Greek poems. And I was working on this idea with an American musician called Gil Scott-Heron. He was the father figure of all Rap, American rappers. Even more than Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye. All those people really admire Gil Scott-Heron. I got to know him; he looked a lot like Ventura physically. He wore even that same hat, and I saw a photo of him, and I tried to talk with him, and I did. And he was very interested in this project, and we started working, doing this poem. The form that we thought it was going to be, it was an Oratorio, like a prayer. It would be two hours of him praying everything, not only for God, for himself, his friends. And then it happened that Gil Scott-Heron died. And I was a bit lost; I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t want to compose. When he died, he didn’t leave me anything. He was working, but I couldn’t find papers or things that he had done. So I started shooting the elevator, and we started the film with the elevator because it was the closest form. I thought I could be closer to that idea that I had about long poems. The elevator came because Ventura – again, this idea of documentary and fiction comes up – I’m always working and listening to him, and he tells me a lot of things. And one day he told me that when he was in the hospital for mental illnesses – he was there for schizophrenia – so he was locked. For him, it was a prison. Hospital and prison were the same. And he said that one night he took an elevator, he saw the hospital was empty, and when he got to the elevator, there was a man, a shadow with a long cape. But this cape, this robe, was metal, iron. So I asked him, but what is this? And he never explained. So slowly I got to this soldier. Then I realized the soldiers that I used to see during the revolution, young soldiers, left-wing, long hair, militias, Che Guevara things. They used to be around all the time, and it got into the film, and then the scene became a confrontation of Ventura with his own past, with his own moments. Because Ventura was here in the revolution during that time that I told you about, 1974. He was in Lisbon, my city. So I did what everybody would do. I told Ventura, let’s take a map of Lisbon and tell me where you were. Because in these kinds of historical moments, you know where you were that day and at that time. And with a pen, he told me where he was. And I know where I was. So we were very close in the city, in that geography. And so we were always moving very close, but he was – speaking metaphorically – closed in an elevator with a mean soldier. And I was free outside with my black banner or red banner, shouting “free the people” or “long live the revolution” or something else. He was afraid and was afraid because he saw the soldiers, and he didn’t know what was happening. And he came to work, not to strike. He came to earn money, not to demonstrate in the streets. So he was afraid, and he thought my life is over. So that’s what he is trying to say in the elevator. And the soldier being one of those revolutionary soldiers, he has these two sides. He’s very kind sometimes, saying we are with you, the revolution is a good thing, and the dark side that announces the end of all revolutions. When dark things start appearing, Ridley Scott starts appearing. We are going to be arrested by Warner Brothers or something, you and me, behind bars. That’s a kind of a prayer for what could have been and what failed. So everybody was a bit criticizing me because it’s a dark vision of a very bright moment of our history. But there’s always two sides to everything. There is the dark side too, and the dark side of a revolution is a very sad thing, I tell you. When everything collapses and people become what they used to be. Everything that happens in the world today, we see young people behaving like they have no dreams. Or they believe in things that are completely populist. This kind of fake world where we live today. It’s a lack of fiction and documentary too. People don’t see the reality. So I think films should be there to accelerate some things and make people think.
One short biographical question. You also said that before cinema, you were closer to music, but also poetry. How important was poetry for you at a younger age, and does poetry still have a role in your films, past films, and future films?
It still does, yeah. I make no distinctions like documentary and fiction. It seems like we’re comparing poetry and prose. There’s no difference, of course. It happens that poetry is young; it has something to do with young age, like cinema, I think. It’s a form that is always connected with the very young or the very old, for me. Very old Greek poets or very young poets like Rimbaud. I like all kinds. In this country, Portugal, maybe in Turkey too, there are a lot of poets; there is a big tradition in poetry. There have always been young poets. And poetry is something that, in my days and today even, is close to what cinema could have been, in the commercial sense, you know. You write and you try to publish, and you get refused. And then you do this yourself, the book yourself. There’s a lot of poets publishing their own books in every country. And that could have been cinema too. The author publishing. It’s made by you or three friends. Or a publishing house is just three guys. It happens a lot here, in your country. And then I think me, you, we are closer to poetry in film. For us, film is more free; it doesn’t have to be a story. It doesn’t have to be dramatic; no need for a dramaturgical arc. Because it’s not being a conventional form. It’s just that I think more and more, this idea of story, of script, is very much linked to the market, to money. It’s just that. If you have a story, you are one of us, and you are in an industry, and you are facing the market, and those are the good things. I think we are outside a bit; the people we like are always being outside. In a way, we are closer to poetry, I think, free form, free association, we like to think about putting things together that come from very different places. Things like that. And things that you are not allowed in the school of scriptwriting, where you have to do this and the character has to live this…
You said, “Some directors make films to remember things and I make films to forget things.” In a world where cinema is so associated with personal memory, how does making a film help you forget things?
It’s not to help forget things. It was a reaction to somebody or to this notion or to this common cliché that films are here to remind us of things. Some films also have the function of making us forget. Remember that forgetting is important. That’s what I mean. Sometimes remembering that something called forgetfulness exists. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but it exists. You forget things. And sometimes it’s good that you forget some things. It’s your only chance to survive. I have to forget a lot of things every day, and more and more in this society. It’s a way of arming yourself, protecting yourself. I want to forget, for instance, with my film, that another cinema exists. If people are seeing one of my films, they would forget other films. It’s that notion. I cannot explain to you; it’s just a feeling. Cinema, for me, used to be a very special and complex world. You got into this world, and you forget a lot of things. Things that are harmful to you, that are not good for you. I said that especially thinking about Ventura. Because it was related to “Horse Money,” and I think that Ventura, more than trying to remember – a soldier almost torturing him with the past. I don’t want to go too far, but I think that if you’re touched by cinema, it means that you have a sort of fragility. Your sensibilities are special, and then you’re very vulnerable, you’re very fragile. If you see Ventura, you see this guy who is completely vulnerable, fragile, almost like you can do whatever you want with him, like he is just a puppet. And being tortured by this soldier, it is like saying to him: remember how you were so weak, so low, your life is nothing. So this remembering that Ventura does – his memory is coming back – is a way of forgetting. He has to forget all this awful world to be somebody else. It’s like diving to come up. It’s a sea of oblivion, not remembrance. He has to come up. And I think cinema has a lot to do with that, of course, with remembering and forgetting.
The direct confrontation in a way can help to forget it.
Absolutely, yeah. It’s a cliché saying that films will make you remember; they make you forget too. And it’s good to forget; it’s not bad. It depends if you’re in the process of analysis. It’s sometimes good to forget. It’s a way of protecting yourself. More and more, I think we have to protect cinema, humanity. What we’re talking about can be seen or can be judged or interpreted in a bad way. Yes, I know how to say it. It’s going to be difficult to think about films and making films after what’s happening in Gaza. I think if you just watch other things, not just CNN, but if you go watch Al Jazeera where things are shown, it’s going to be very difficult for you to think about an image. For me, it is. I know that later I will turn on the TV, and I will see something, and I will turn it off. And I don’t want to forget those guys in Gaza. Of course not. But I cannot see that. It’s because I was not educated about that side of images. I knew that images were, like I said, peaceful. But I don’t want to forget the world and the cruelty and the fascism and the massacre that is going on. So that again is remembering and forgetting. What should we forget, what should we remember? So we just keep thinking.
The last question we have is just out of curiosity; for the first time, an interview with you will be published in the Turkish language. Our readers will also be curious about your view on Turkish cinema. If you have some impressions, would you like to share them?
Well, not Turkish cinema in general, because I didn’t see much. I saw the films that everybody saw, everybody educated, I mean. I’m going to tell you what I saw in the old days, the same thing that we all saw; it was the first one, “Yol”. And then I more or less crossed paths with your hero. We talked two or three times, but very superficially, just at a table at some festival. But I liked especially one of his films; I’m always mistaking the title. It’s one of the first films, not the first one, the first with his wife.
You mean “Climates”, Nuri Bilge Ceylan plays himself.
Right, the first films were important in a way. Now it’s a bit more difficult for me. This existential thing…
Maybe you saw “Winter Sleep” or “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”?
I haven’t seen the last one. That one is about inquiry, the police?
Yeah, about the murder. Exactly, that’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”.
No, I saw three films completely, so bits and pieces. But they were heavy for me. Heavy in the sense that they are closer to some form of literature. They have a literary weight, a plastic form. That’s what I know from Turkish cinema. I’m sure that a lot more things exist, and I’ll wait for your films.
Othon (Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet,1970)
Sure, and then finally would you like to say anything to the readers of Othon Cinema?
There is something in French, but you have to translate it into Turkish, and then it won’t make sense. It was what Marguerite Duras said. You know her critique of the film “Othon” that she wrote? She used to write some film critics. It’s a short text, very beautiful. She says a lot of things about the play by Corneille, how Straub worked on the play. And then she says – but that’s French – “Ne soyez pas con, allez voir Othon!” – which means “Don’t be an idiot, go and see Othon!”. You can say the same for your magazine: “Don’t be an idiot, go and read Othon Cinema!”. It’s like the fireplaces, you have to keep the fire burning. I know how it is. I’ve also been in film magazines a little bit with friends a long time ago. It’s like a film. You have to keep the fire burning. So you’re trying, it’s very desperate sometimes. I am here to help you with the fire. I’m sure a lot of filmmakers and people will help you with that.
Thanks for everything.
Interview: Enes Serenli, Mert Mustafa Babacan, Matthias Kyska
Translation: Keda Bakış
Visual Design: Büşra Yavuz
Othon Cinema 