Director Zeki Demirkubuz Talks to Jamie Bell about His “Tales of Darkness” Trilogy. Sight and Sound.
Director Zeki Demirkubuz Talks to Jamie Bell about His “Tales of Darkness”
“As a film-maker, what attracts me most in human nature is its dark side,” says Zeki Demirkubuz, the 41-year-old Turkish director of Fate, a film inspired by Albert Camus’ classic novel The Outsider. The film is stripped to essentials, tackling the themes of the book with a rigorous seriousness only occasionally offset with moments of dry humour. It’s certainly a good deal more successful than Luchino Visconti’s 1967 adaptation.
Camus’ novel is about an amoral young man named Meursault who commits an inexplicable murder, but whose true crime in the eyes of society is his utter indifference to conventional norms of behaviour. Demirkubuz relocates Camus’ story to present-day Istanbul, casting the Meursault character as Musa, an emotionally blank office worker. “I read The Outsider in 1990 and, after Dostoevsky, it is the book that has most influenced me.” Demirkubuz’s initial attempts at a faithful adaptation proved unsatisfactory, so the director decided to deviate from its second half. In Camus’ novel, Meursault commits the murder he is tried for. In Fate, Musa is framed by the real killer, his boss Naim – the latter is jealous of Musa because of his marriage to Sinem, with whom Naim is having an affair. Musa disdains protesting his innocence and is sent to prison. Demirkubuz explains: “I found the second half of The Outsider to be quite didactic, especially the courtroom parts. So in the film Musa had to accept a crime which he had not committed, because I thought the court scene was really impossible to film satisfactorily, and besides, I didn’t like the scene in the novel”.
At Fate’s centre is the Turkish actor Serdar Orçin, whose impassive features and resigned movements perfectly capture Musa’s emotional void. “I made the decision to cast him while we were having a regular conversation,” says the director. “We were talking, and suddenly I realised that he wasn’t really listening to me; or to put it more correctly, I realised that he didn’t understand what I was saying, and the facial expression he had at that moment of realisation made me think of Musa.”
Made in 2001, Fate is the first film in a trilogy Demirkubuz has referred to as the ‘Tales of Darkness’, which also includes Confession (2002) and the loosely autobiographical Bekleme Odasi (2004), in which a film director, played by Demirkubuz, struggles unsuccessfully to complete a film of Crime and Punishment. (Demirkubuz still nurtures a plan to film Dostoevsky’s novel, but is in no rush, saying, “I haven’t been able to come up with a Raskolnikov who would be believable.”) Asked about the ‘Tales of Darkness’ series, he says: “I regret the decision to name it a trilogy, because now, after six or seven films, I realise that I will continue to make films about these subjects.”
Demirkubuz began making movies in the early 1990s, after a period in prison for membership of a radical Maoist group. “I was imprisoned between the ages of 17 and 21. I’m a pure unbeliever now, but I’m not an atheist: I believe in doubt, and it’s that feeling that makes it impossible for me to be a communist, or a follower of any other ideology. When I was in prison I read Crime and Punishment for the first time, and it really helped me understand what I had lived through. I felt [my time in prison] was going to lead into something. I thought I would become a writer, but I became a film-maker.”
Another coveted project is an adaptation of J M Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning 1999 novel Disgrace. Demirkubuz says: “I feel a strong affinity with Coetzee, and I do hope to film [Disgrace]. But I know that an Italian director is also interested”. With his abiding interest in austere subjects and questions of ethics, Demirkubuz’s films have been compared to Bresson’s and Kieslowski’s. He acknowledges the comparisons, but says: “My sources have really been life and literature, and my own inner darkness.”
Jamie Bell. Sight and Sound. February 2006.
