Sometimes you see a movie so good, you need to tell everyone you meet: go see it. Such is Three Monkeys by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, which I watched last night on DVD. A brilliant, beautiful, slow-burning, disturbing film. Ceylan comes from a still photography background and the cinematography is painterly, evocative and stunning. But this is not just eye candy. The slow-moving story with few characters pulls you in without you knowing it. One minute you’re thinking it’s an arthouse cinematography fest about lonely people. And then, 20 minutes later, you realize the story, the suspense, the dialogue are masterful and very well-crafted. It’s just that the fuse is long–but it’s path certainly not random. And that you’re sitting on the edge of your seat. When final sequence rolls, of the father/protagonist on his roof, you are both awed at the beauty of the image, moved by what’s just happened, and left feeling unnerved, relieved and saddened–at the same time.
I won’t tell you the story. But here’s my synopsis:
Faustian deals beget Faustian deals. They’re never neat. No one is untouched.
And the sub-header: politicians are amoral rats.
The trailer, while whetting the appetite for the excellent cinematography, is not at all representative of the movie: the trailer makes me think it is a horror/thriller movie. But it’s not at all. It’s a morality play about unhappy people. Very spare and beautifully economical. Writing dovetails with imagery dovetails with coloring dovetails with editing. It’s not typically a “my kind of movie” (you’re waiting for the woman lead character to be strong, but she’s not–rather pathetic and victimized; the overtly political angle, the mosaic of society is stripped away, etc.), but I came away feeling in love with the movie. And after watching and reading interviews with him, deep respect and a close kinship with the director. Indie filmmakers: this is what you should aspire too! This is what I aspire too. Forget all the comic book retreads, forget special effects, forget formulaic Hollywood movies about weddings you can only get halfway through on a plane, and formulaic “festival films”. This is how to make a movie, lovingly crafted, end-to-end. Moviemaking is not dead. Long love Ceylan!
Oh, and Ceylan shot digitally, apparently on Sony CineAlta F900s. I’ll let him speak about why he loves shooting digitally and give some brilliant insights into filmmaking, in excerpts here from this interview from The Guardian with Geoff Andrew, onstage at the BFI Southbank:
On being self-taught and the importance of knowing all aspects of film-making and business:
I never worked on other films, as assistant director or anything, so I never learned how other directors worked. I learned everything from books myself, and I learned every aspect of film-making, including sales and marketing. Even in Cannes, I was selling the film myself, and they said that there was only one other director who sold his films himself – [Abderrehmane] Sissako from Africa. It’s unusual, and distributors were a bit surprised. I learned how to do it but I don’t do that any more. Now I have a producer and a cinematographer, everything. It is unnecessary, but at that time, I wanted to know it. I think a director should know many things, especially the technical aspects; otherwise you are a slave of the technical people. If you know the technical aspects, you can communicate with them and direct them much better.
On dialogue in films:
I don’t try to make my characters silent. In the script, that scene had a lot of dialogue. But in the shoot, it’s the only place to understand whether what you wrote works or not. Always during a shoot, I try to find more balance in the situation, so I end up taking dialogue out here and there and finally there’s no dialogue. I feel the balance is reached at that point and I don’t know what to do about it. It just convinces me more like that, somehow. And of course, dialogue should be treated very carefully. I’ve investigated this a lot. I’ve recorded many conversations in order to understand the nature of it. It doesn’t follow a logical progression. Somebody says something, the other person says something entirely different; if you analyse it, you see it is that way. So dialogue, even if you use it, it shouldn’t be so logical and it shouldn’t carry much information about the film’s secrets or the meaning of the film. 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. This is my intention, but maybe I’m not successful.
On why he (and his wife Ebru acted in his own film (“Climates”):
What I wanted to tell with this film was something which is hard to explain and express to other people. I didn’t want to struggle with how to explain to actors how they should act. I wanted them to behave based more on their inclination. Also, when we wrote and talked about the film on holiday, my wife and I, we made a test shot, acting ourselves and we liked the result. So that’s another reason why we did it.
On shooting digitally, in answer to the question “Do you think digital technology is opening up new avenues of expressiveness?”
Definitely. I think it has still more unknown potential to be able to express something deeper or hidden. So film seems like nonsense – why shoot on film any more? This film was shot using old digital technology and now it’s already even much better. Film is expensive and there are many disadvantages. For me, this is it. I’ll never go back to film for movie-making or photography. I think we should be open and use the advantages of this new technology to express our deeper emotions.
On the color grading of “Three Monkeys”:
Actually, I don’t like expressionism – I prefer impressionism, because the feelings and emotions are too underlined in expressionism. But many critics have said that this film is expressionist – maybe they are right. I like to be more subtle and more hidden, making the audience more active. As for the colours, it’s natural that when one looks at something, everybody sees something different. When I look at the world, this is kind of what I see. My photography may have an influence on this – I see colours in this way. When I engaged in the colour grading, I didn’t realise that I had distanced myself from these colours that much. And of course, in this film, I also wanted to isolate the characters a bit. This isolation I made in other ways: for example, I didn’t show any faces other than these characters. And also these colours helped this isolation a bit.
Ceylan’s secret colour grading recipe, so you can easily apply the “Three Monkeys” look to your own projects:
Actually, I didn’t do much: I just increased the contrast and desaturated the colours and then selected one colour, generally red, and pushed it a bit after desaturation.
On sound design:
I don’t like to be realistic in sound. For instance, we heard a sound in the film that I didn’t hear before. Our ears are very selective and we just hear what we want to hear. So, for the audience, I select some sounds and just show them. With the sound, I can guide the audience a little bit in the way I want, and it gives the scene the atmosphere that I want. Also, if you can tell something with the sound, you don’t have to show it.
On starting filmmaking late:
I was quite old, actually, 36 years old. It’s much better if you can start much earlier. I spent at least 10 years without doing anything after university, thinking about what to do for a living. When you’re young, you’re braver and it’s better to make mistakes when you’re younger. When I made that film, I always thought that it would not make a film. I was shooting something but I never expected Cannes would take it, or that I would show it to other people. I thought I was taking something meaningless. In the editing room, I tried to create a concept or a story out of it. There was something in my mind, but I always thought it would not work. And even after I finished the film, I thought it was shit and that nobody would like it. I asked my friends, “Does it look like a film?” I asked the same question when I made my first feature [The Small Town, 1997]. I remember watching it with my sister at the Berlin film festival where it was premiered, and we looked at each other and we were thinking, “It doesn’t look like a film.”
On big vs. small crews:
Actually, both easier and more difficult [to work with a big crew, after working on movies with a small crew]. It depends on how you look at it. I cannot work like the old days – I am older now and I have less energy. Human beings are creatures that very easily get used to luxuries. Until Uzak, I would shoot my films myself. But now, I can’t imagine doing that and it seems to me very difficult. I’m lazy and it seems to me much easier to use a monitor to control the actors, the composition, mise en scène. And I think it should be like this. That’s why I work like this now. But on the other hand, it’s more difficult. In this film, there were about 20- 25 people behind the camera and everything takes time. To move people from one place to another, we need lorries and things. In Uzak, if you remember, there is a snow scene. It lasted a very short time in Istanbul, the snow stayed for only two days. But we managed to shoot everything we needed in two days because we were so small. With only one Jeep, we could move all the crew, the material, all the actors and we could move quickly. We were much faster. So it was easier in that sense. But then, I used to compromise a lot. If I couldn’t solve something, I would change the script and I would adapt myself to many things. Now I compromise less, because I have a producer and he solves many problems, we have more money and we have more people to solve problems. So when you get new possibilities, you don’t want to get rid of them. So, both more difficult and easier, I think.
On his preference for locked off shots:
Ozu is my favourite director, actually. And yes, I don’t move the camera much – but I don’t know if that’s because of Ozu or because I’m a photographer. I jut don’t like to move the camera much, really, because it makes everyone more conscious about the camera. And the height of the camera is mostly decided for me, and I think for Ozu, by the vertical lines in the space. In the books, they say that Ozu put his camera 90cm above the ground but I don’t believe it. It depends on the vertical lines – and there are many of those in Japanese houses.
On relationship of director and cinematographer:
…the psychology of the character is important – if you shoot a person from above, it’s different from shooting them from below. I generally like to shoot at mouth level for a portrait. Especially in closeups, even 1cm is very important. That’s why you should never leave it to the cinematographer, because the cinematographer never knows how to connect it to the next shot; only the director knows the relationship between the next shot and the previous shot. So the director should carefully place the camera to ensure continuity of the psychology.
On music in film:
I don’t like music in cinema, it seems to me like a crutch; if you cannot express something in cinematic ways, then you call the help of the music to underline it. I’m not against it, but if possible I try not to use it. In the editing, I try many pieces of music, but eventually I decide not to use any. And also, the sound of the atmosphere is the nicest sound for me in the cinema, so I prefer to use atmospheric sound instead of music. Because music kills things.
