"In my films the landscapes connect the characters to a sense of something cosmic. I try to recapture those moments in life where you suddenly feel that connection to a wider universe." Nuri Bilge Ceylan, The List, Issue 571In his anamorphic photographs, his emphasis on space and place, seems perfectly expressed as he both captures the expansive and austere beauty he sees, but also distorts and twists the way that we look at it, both in terms of simple perspective, and in terms of the heightened artificiality of the light.
all photos above - Nuri Bilge Ceylan from his website
I recently read a great interview with filmmaker Ramin Bahrani (here is another great interview with him), director of Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and Goodbye Solo in which he talks about the importance of place in his filmmaking process, from conception to completion. He says:
Unless you’re doing a space movie or something it makes no sense to sit alone in a room and write. You go to the real location—you write. You go the real location—you rewrite. You go to the real location—you reconceive. You meet the real people, you add them into your script, you change them a little for your fictional means. You cast, either from the real location or outside the real location, and based on those people you rewrite again.In the films in my head, I am definitely not one for interiors. Place and landscape always play a dominant role in the things I have and hope to make. I spoke with a friend recently about a film we are hoping to shoot late next year. We have been having difficulties in financing because (among other things) where we want to shoot it falls between all the funding gaps, being based in one of the territories and not being eligible for 'remote' financing. A friend said, why not just set it here in Melbourne. My heart dropped. Although it's a fine question - if the story is the thing, why shouldn't it be transportable - I knew that for some inexplicable reason, it had to be filmed in and around the landscapes that I had first conceived it taking place in. It is not that these landscapes are impossibly singular or that this story could not take place elsewhere. It is simply that this landscape has a floating quality that I can't imagine really understanding until I see it unfolding in a fictional cinematic landscape. That will help me to understand it. It is also that the landscape itself has always been so stitched into the experience of the film that I don't know what the film is without it. More often than not, a script for me comes from a place or an experience of a landscape. When I move through a place or see photographs of a location, stories come. The characters never exist prior to that.
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