When time stands still – Interview with Alphan Eşeli, director of The Long Way Home
Turkish director Alphan Eşeli’s first feature debuted in Hungary in the competition selection at this year’s Titanic Film Festival. The Long Way Home is not quite a war film, but more of a disturbing anti-war story focusing on seven people’s fight for survival while trapped in East-Anatolia after the 1915 battle of Sarikamis. The film was especially interesting for the Hungarian audience, since its music was composed by Béla Tarr’s close collaborator, Mihály Víg.
This is not your first time visiting Budapest. You have been here a couple of times, because your film’s music was composed by Mihály Víg.
Yes, it is really great to be back in Budapest, because we recorded the music of the film here. It is very important for me that the film is now screened in Hungary too.
I contacted Mihály, because I have seen the films he made together with Béla Tarr. I really like his work and I thought that he would be the perfect composer for my movie too. Collaborating with a musician is always a challenge, because as a filmmaker you are stepping over to another form of art. First I started to work together with a Turkish composer, but in the end I think I made the right decision by choosing Mihály. I am proud of our work. It was a great collaboration.
The film centres on a tragic historical event. In 1915, 90 000 Turkish soldiers were practically sent to their deaths. Your film brutally depicts the effect that war has on people. How did the Turkish audience react to it?
The film was very well received in Turkey, but unfortunately it didn’t reach a large audience. I think around 50 000 people have seen it, which is still a good result with this kind of a film. 90% of the film critics were also very positive about it. Of course we received some criticism too, especially on social media sites, because most war films in Turkey are usually more patriotic and heroic and the Turkish audience is not really accustomed to seeing Turkish soldiers killing each other, and even eating corpses. It was a big taboo. However, in a time like this, especially in the Middle East, where we are surrounded with lots of wars going on, people might be able to relate more to a movie that is precisely anti-war and, instead of patriotic and heroic ideology, shows the dark side of it, because that is what wars are really about. It is a traumatic experience for the people who are in it and also for those who are left behind.
The film’s style is very minimalist; it depicts the people who were left behind rather than the war. Did you intend to differ in this aspect too from traditional war movies, shifting the focus from action to the devastated atmosphere?
The film tells a story about seven people being trapped in an abandoned village. They are trapped in an isolated environment, so their deterioration slowly begins. As time progresses, it moves slower and slower and then in the end it almost stands still. This was a very conscious decision; right from the very first scene I wanted to structure the film this way. I wanted the viewer to experience time. By the middle of the film, time really stands still. I did not want one scene to trigger the other; I did not want to break this structure, but I wanted the audience to experience this feeling together with the characters. I also thought a lot about the dialogue. At the beginning we wrote a lot of dialogue in the script, but eventually I felt it would be unrealistic if people were talking a lot in those situations. We wrote scenes where they were discussing their lives or the little girl’s father, but at one point I felt that I was only forcing the dialogues into the film. I thought that there was not much to talk about, and they only have two options: either waiting or leaving.
They are waiting in the snowy mountains in piercing cold weather. It must have been very difficult to shoot in inhospitable, rough circumstances.
It was obviously a very, very difficult film to shoot in terms of the location and the weather. We had a brutal winter that year in 2012. The location was a real abandoned little village in East Anatolia. The interiors were sometimes even colder than the exteriors, because we were working in totally abandoned buildings. I never thought about shooting it in a sound stage or building a set.
The positive side was that shooting on real locations helped the actors tremendously. All those things that they were reading about in the script were right there. Everything was real, so they just had to go there and play their part. Essentially, we had very similar conditions to the people in the film: we were cut out in the middle of East Anatolia and we stayed there for five weeks with nobody going back. Of course we had difficult times too. If you work for a long time in such conditions, some tension is inevitable, but all things considered it had a very positive effect on the film.
You mentioned that it was an anti-war film. In the final note, you dedicated this film to your grandfather. Are you interested in social topics or is filmmaking more a personal, private experience for you?
I am not a social rights activist, so I am not going to pretend that I am one. Of course, I am interested in social topics. However, you can be obsessed with anything. There are two things that you have to separate. There is the filmmaking part and there is the storytelling part. In filmmaking you are the boss, a filmmaker always shoots the movie that he wants to shoot. But with the story, you have to have a personal connection. It can even be someone else’s material, if the script is very good. This never happened to me though. In Turkey none of the scripts that I read triggered anything in me. That is why I started writing myself. The topic can be anything. If you are obsessed with football, then you are going to make a movie about football. It does not need to be a social statement. Oliver Stone said once in an interview, when his Doors movie received a lot of criticism, that you will never be able to please everybody. The most important thing is that you have to be just to the story.
This is your first feature film, but it has a very distinct, minimalist style.
If I want to be really honest, I think it was maybe a bit too much for a first film. The ambition in the film is too big. I have been to a lot of festivals and I have seen a lot of top award winning films. I am going to be very, very honest. I watched those films and maybe they were more flawless, but they were also very small films. I am not talking about the production, but about the filmmaking ambition. All those films had very small stories. Mine on the other hand, was something maybe too big to chew. I am talking about the filmmaking style of the film and what the film is trying to achieve, about the perfectionism the film is trying to achieve in every level. It made it very hard. You have to be very brave to make the storytelling decisions in the film. If you cannot stand behind them, they could look like mistakes. However, if you are able to stand behind them and go all the way, then you can achieve great filmmaking. I think it was a very ambitious project in every sense for a first film.
I have seen many Hollywood films. In Hollywood, if you are a talent, you are given a whole army of experts you can work with. Think about all the different parameters that make a film visually look great. There are many aspects. Not only do you need a good camera and lighting, but you also have to choose your locations carefully. You can shoot it anywhere, but for example it took me one and a half months to find the all the other locations, except the village. There was also a lot of distance between the different locations. What you see in the film is not just one cave, it is THE cave. I had to find the best one. We were searching for it for many weeks, because it had to be the perfect cave and I think it looks amazing in the film. You need to perfect all these parameters to make the film look good. It is not only cinematography. Everything that is in the frame of picture has to be perfect. Of course, if you want to make a film like There will be blood as your first film, it is just too much. That might be the biggest criticism of my film. You will never be able to make a film like There will be blood, if you do not have an actor like Daniel Day-Lewis. Or you cannot make a film like Apocalypse Now as your first film. In this aspect the film is not perfect, but I am proud of it. I think I passed the test. What I am really proud of in the film is that it tells the story from the first scene till the last in the very same perspective. The camera is always at the same distance.
You used to shoot commercials in the US. Is this where your technical professionalism come from?
Yes. The most important thing is that you have an idea and that you are able to transfer that idea to film. In the first 4-5 years of making commercials I was learning how to transfer ideas to films. I learned a lot about light through photography, but from day one I was still very visual. If you want to make a movie, you have to learn how to create an image. In commercials I worked with a lot of famous, Academy Award winning cinematographers, so I learned it. You have to learn it to be able to make a movie. Even if you are going to have a heart surgery tomorrow, you have to learn a little bit about your disease before. You have to be a little familiar with accounting; otherwise your accountants are going to rob you. It is just the same in filmmaking: I won’t allow anyone to shoot a picture with bad cinematography, because I learned how to do it.
Of course this is difficult in a country that does not have the industry. It is very different from the US where every department is perfect. The director comes up with a vision and a lot of professionals work hard in every department to take that vision to the next level. In other countries where you do not have this kind of industry, you have to fight to keep your vision from being jeopardised.
Is this the reason why you searched for a foreign composer? Because it is difficult to find the right professionals at home?
Of course. Classical music is not part of our culture. I knew exactly what kind of music I wanted. Although Mihály is not a classical composer, he has it in his blood. Eastern Europe is the homeland for contemporary classical music.
Even if you do not know much about sounds or music, you can exactly tell the difference between the sound of a door closing in a Béla Tarr film or in a Terrence Malick film. I did not know anything about sounds, so I “watched” 3-4 films with my eyes closed from beginning to end. For example I watched The New World by Terrence Malick. If you close your eyes, you can really hear someone walking on the deck of a 17th century wooden ship. I was really meditating on sounds.
You mentioned that you knew exactly what kind of music you wanted. So how much freedom did Mihály Víg have in creating it?
That was also one of the most difficult parts. I had an idea as a director, but I am not a musician. I have good taste in music and I love music, but I cannot make music. I am familiar with cinematography and acting, because those come from my profession. I am good at photography, so I can say things like “make this picture a bit darker here”, or “let’s use a slightly wider lens there”. However, I can only talk about filmmaking. Music is a different form of art, so you have to trust the other artist. It is very important that the music blends into the film.
The film has a touch of a genre with its thriller effect and if I wanted to use the music to enhance those moments, that would be ridiculous. However, if you want to use it as atmosphere, a lot of questions are raised immediately: which scene will have music? When does it start? When does it finish? I think the only problem we had to bridge was that we had very little time. You should not rush these things.
Filmmaking is like a very complicated jigsaw puzzle: you have to try every little piece to achieve the perfect picture in the end. This needs a lot of time, a lot of stamina and a lot of money.
originally published in Hungarian at: http://prae.hu/prae/articles.php?aid=7249
The Long Way Home (2013)
Eve Dönüs: Sarikamis 1915 (original title)
112 min - Drama | History | War - 8 March 2013 (Turkey)
Director: Alphan Eşeli
Writers: Alphan Eşeli, Serdar Tantekin
Music: Mihály Víg
Cinematography: Hayk Kirakosyan
Editing: Omer Ozyilmazel
Stars: Ugur Polat (Saci Bey), Nergis Öztürk (Gül Hanim), Serdar Orcin (Onbasi Sami), Muharrem Bayrak (Çoban Ali), Sevket Suha Tezel (Er Mahmut), Sila Cetindag (Zeynep)
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