‘Yoghurt, murder’ with director Ceylan

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

British daily The Guardian published an interview on Feb. 29 with world-renowned Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, on his latest film “Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da” (Once Upon A Time in Anatolia).

In the interview, titled “Yoghurt and Murder with Nuri Bilge Ceylan,” Stuart Jeffries said that although it won the Cannes Grand Prix at Cannes, some people have walked out of the film.

Jeffries describes Ceylan’s film as an “especially lugubrious, austerely beautiful 157-minute police procedural in which a murder suspect is driven around the Anatolian steppes at night in a convoy of police cars, to find the place where he and his brother buried their victim. Along the way, we learn lots of increasingly gloomy things: what kind of yoghurt the cops like.”

Referring to the girl around whom the film’s story turns, Ceylan said: “If you see a girl like this in London, it wouldn’t influence you. There are many beautiful girls around. In the desert, when a girl like that, at the end of a long night, appears like a Madonna in your ordinary world, that moment has the sense of a miracle.” This also helped them solve a critical script problem: “We wanted to find a realistic reason.’”