Çıplak Geldim, Çıplak Gideceğim

Çıplak Geldim, Çıplak Gideceğim

Ulusoy Dergisi — archived 7 February 2007

This interview changes the chronology of Nejat İşler’s philosophy.

For years, the sentence most closely associated with his mature view of work and money seemed to belong to a much later period:

“Amacım zamanı satın almak.”

But the idea was already fully formed in this earlier interview.

In 2007, before Kaybedenler Kulübü, before his withdrawal from intensive television work, before Gümüşlük and seven years before his serious illness, İşler was already saying that he did not want to use money to increase his standard of living.

He wanted money for something else:

time.

That makes this one of the most important early interviews in the archive.

A Career That Happened Almost by Accident

İşler begins by describing a life that did not follow a carefully designed plan.

He had once considered political science.

He ended up at the conservatory.

He had tried different forms of work.

Acting gradually became the profession that continued carrying him forward.

He does not describe this as destiny in a romantic sense.

His language is closer to:

circumstances meet you,

you make a decision,

then another thing happens.

The absence of a grand career plan is important.

It explains why he later sounds so indifferent to conventional career goals.

No Great Acting Master Plan

Asked about his ambitions, İşler repeatedly removes drama from the profession.

He does not describe himself as someone who spent childhood dreaming of becoming a famous actor.

Even after success arrives, he is reluctant to turn acting into the central meaning of his existence.

This is a pattern that will survive for decades.

He takes acting seriously.

He does not necessarily take the idea of being an actor with the same sacred seriousness.

Theatre Comes First

When asked to choose between theatre, cinema and television, his hierarchy is clear.

Theatre matters most.

Cinema matters.

Television is largely economic.

That distinction is unusually blunt.

Television provides income.

Theatre gives him greater creative ownership.

Cinema attracts him, but at this stage he still sees himself mainly as an actor inside somebody else’s cinematic structure.

Television as Economic Service

İşler describes television almost like going somewhere to collect money.

The metaphor deliberately removes artistic glamour.

He knows television will pay.

That makes it financially predictable.

But he does not treat the work as the highest expression of his acting ambitions.

This is important because his later conflict with television is often interpreted as a sudden rebellion around 2010.

The division already exists here.

The Television Problem Predates Kapalıçarşı

Three years before the Kapalıçarşı conflict, İşler already sounds exhausted by television.

He describes moving continuously between sets and says he has never worked this much before.

His metaphor is military service:

something temporary that has to be completed before returning to the life he actually wants.

The language is extreme, but the underlying structure is clear.

Television is being tolerated partly because it finances another future.

Work Now, Live Later

This creates an important tension.

He is working intensely in order to gain freedom later.

But the work itself is consuming the time he says he values most.

That paradox will become central to his later life.

Earn money by selling time.

Then use the money to recover time.

The entire philosophy of “buying time” is already present.

The Archive’s Earliest Clear “Buy Time” Statement

When asked how money changed his life, İşler does not talk about houses, cars or status.

He explains that his standard of living is not the reason he wants money.

Then comes the central idea:

“Amacım zamanı satın almak.”

The phrase is concise, but it contains a complete economic philosophy.

Money has instrumental value.

Time has final value.

This Changes the 2017 Interpretation

The importance of this source is difficult to overstate.

The 2017 Habertürk interview should no longer be treated as the moment when İşler discovers or first names this philosophy.

Instead:

2007: the philosophy already exists.

2010: television makes the cost of lost time more urgent.

2015: he reorganizes his life around it.

2017: he states and develops the philosophy again after illness and Gümüşlük.

The later interview is still important.

But it is confirmation and development, not origin.

Property Is Already a Problem

The same section contains another idea normally associated with later İşler.

He says he has no particular desire to acquire property.

His language is deliberately radical:

“Mülkiyet hırsızlık gibi bir şey.”

What matters is not whether this functions as a rigorous political theory.

The important archival fact is that he already associates possession with something uncomfortable.

More ownership is not his image of success.

Naked Arrival, Naked Departure

His summary is even simpler:

“Çıplak geldim, çıplak gideceğim.”

That thought connects money with mortality.

Whatever is accumulated during life cannot finally be kept.

Again, this appears years before the health crisis that almost killed him.

Mortality is already shaping his economic imagination.

Illness Did Not Invent the Philosophy

This source strongly supports a central principle for reading the whole archive.

Do not tell the story as:

Nejat İşler nearly died in 2014 and suddenly rejected materialism.

The evidence is incompatible with that interpretation.

By 2007 he had already expressed:

• suspicion of property,
• low attachment to accumulation,
• time as the real goal of money,
• awareness of mortality.

The illness later intensifies an existing philosophy.

It does not create it.

Money Speeds Up Time

There is another subtle idea in his answer about money.

Money, he suggests, allows things to happen faster.

This is more sophisticated than simply saying money is unimportant.

He understands its power.

Money reduces waiting.

It can provide mobility.

It can make choices available earlier.

The issue is therefore not rejecting money.

It is deciding what money is for.

Tezgah: The Alternative Life

One concrete alternative appears throughout the interview:

Tezgah, the book-café he opened with friends in Galatasaray.

İşler speaks about it with a kind of affection that is different from the way he talks about television.

The shop represents:

books,

friends,

a smaller social environment,

greater control.

At one point, when asked to choose between bookselling and acting, his preference is strikingly clear.

Bookselling wins.

The Famous Actor Who Would Rather Sell Books

This is one of the strangest contradictions in the early archive.

Professionally, acting is producing success.

Personally, İşler remains attached to an activity with far less status.

This is not necessarily because bookselling is easier.

It represents a different scale of life.

The celebrity becomes visible to millions.

The bookseller deals with people one by one.

Fame Takes Observation Away

Perhaps the most important consequence of celebrity appears when İşler discusses public recognition.

He says one of the things he most enjoys is watching people.

Fame interferes with that.

Once people recognize him, they stop behaving normally.

He can no longer simply sit and observe.

The observer has become the observed.

Acting Depends on Watching People

This matters enormously because later interviews repeatedly describe observation as the foundation of his acting.

He watches:

gestures,

voices,

behavior,

social types.

But success as an actor makes the very activity that feeds acting more difficult.

Celebrity therefore contains a professional paradox.

The better known the observer becomes, the harder ordinary observation becomes.

Public Attention Changes Reality

When İşler enters a bus or public place, people notice him.

The social environment changes.

He is no longer looking at everyday life from inside it.

His presence becomes an event.

That is one of the costs of fame that money cannot easily solve.

He Does Not Want to Explain Himself

The interview also contains a remarkably early version of his later media philosophy.

He says he receives many interview requests.

He dislikes the expectation that he must continuously explain himself.

The logic is simple:

he does not even constantly explain himself to friends.

Why should he repeatedly explain himself to strangers?

This attitude will remain extraordinarily stable.

Interviews as Celebrity Labor

Later, he will eventually accept that promotional interviews are part of signing a film contract.

Here, the resistance is still stronger.

Publicity feels like an additional job attached to the actual profession.

Acting is one thing.

Continuously producing “Nejat İşler” for public consumption is another.

At the Edge of the Market

One of the interview’s most revealing self-descriptions is that he sees himself not fully inside the market but at its edge.

He does the work.

Then he leaves.

This sounds almost exactly like the position he will describe more than a decade later in other contexts.

Inside enough to participate.

Outside enough to retain distance.

Not Outside Popular Culture

At the same time, İşler is realistic.

He says nobody can truly stand outside popular culture.

The meaningful action is not total escape.

It is awareness and distance.

That is a much more sophisticated position than the public mythology of a pure outsider.

He understands that he participates in the system.

He wants breathing room inside it.

Creating Spaces to Breathe

This phrase may be another key to the archive.

His career repeatedly involves creating spaces in which he can breathe.

Tezgah.

Theatre.

Cinema.

Later Gümüşlük.

Later writing.

Later independent production.

The specific space changes.

The function remains.

No Debt Means Mobility

İşler also connects freedom with not becoming indebted to other people professionally.

If future obligations remain limited, he can move more easily.

Again, freedom is structural.

Not an attitude.

Not a leather jacket.

Not rebellion.

It depends on reducing obligations that can control future decisions.

The Leading-Man Label Still Looks Absurd to Him

The interview again raises the idea that İşler is one of cinema’s new leading men.

He treats the description humorously.

He does not imagine himself as the star who has arrived to save the team.

The football metaphor he uses is modest:

he can play,

but he is not the heroic striker brought in to rescue everybody.

This directly continues the resistance first visible in 2003.

Fame Arrived Late Enough to Be Distrusted

İşler makes an important observation about age.

People began telling him he was a good actor when he was around thirty.

He believes that if this had happened at twenty-one, the effect might have been different.

That is psychologically plausible.

Recognition arrived after other kinds of life experience.

Street selling.

Books.

Military service.

Theatre.

Different jobs.

Celebrity therefore entered an already formed identity.

Success Does Not Fully Replace the Older Self

He still wears similar clothes.

Sees the same people.

Eats similarly.

At least this is how he describes himself.

Whether total continuity is ever possible is less important than the intention.

He does not want professional success to require a completely new lifestyle.

Tiyatro as Future Autonomy

The future he imagines is not retirement.

It is theatre.

He speaks about an anti-theatre form:

improvised,

playful,

breaking conventional rules,

directly connected with audiences.

This is important because it reveals that withdrawal from commercial work is meant to make space for another kind of work.

Again:

he does not want to stop creating.

He wants different conditions.

Writing Never Fully Disappears

The interview also asks about playwriting.

İşler says he is not actively writing at that moment, but writing continues in his head.

This small comment becomes highly important in retrospect.

In 2019, he will explain almost the same thing in greater detail:

acting became so intensive that the stories remained in his mind but did not reach paper.

The 2007 interview already documents that interruption.

A Future Beyond Acting

İşler says he would eventually like to understand cinema beyond acting alone.

At the time, theatre feels more under his control because he can write and shape it.

Cinema still belongs more heavily to other people’s structures.

This is an extraordinary early signal of the path that eventually leads to producing.

From Actor to Builder

Read across the whole archive:

2007: cinema is not yet fully his; he is mainly the actor.

2024: he co-produces Evcilik.

2025: he defines the producer as the person who builds the structure.

This development takes nearly twenty years.

But its beginning is visible here.

Travel as the Real Future Goal

Near the end of the interview, İşler describes one of his few explicit long-term ambitions.

After forty, he wants the conditions necessary to travel around the world.

Again, the goal is not:

larger house,

greater fame,

higher professional rank.

It is freedom of movement.

Experience.

Time.

Slowness Before Gümüşlük

İşler also says people need to calm down and move more slowly.

His metaphor is vivid: society moves like an elephant inside a crystal palace.

Speed causes damage.

This statement predates Gümüşlük by years.

The later movement toward a slower life therefore has an intellectual prehistory.

A Philosophy Already Remarkably Complete

By the end of this interview, many themes normally associated with the older Nejat İşler are already present:

• money as a means rather than an end,
• buying time,
• suspicion of property,
• mortality,
• dislike of fame,
• privacy,
• human observation,
• distance from the market,
• preference for books and theatre,
• dissatisfaction with television,
• need for breathing space,
• travel,
• slower living.

This is not a rough first version.

It is surprisingly complete.

Why This Interview Matters

The Ulusoy Dergisi interview is one of the most important discoveries in the archive because it forces us to revise the chronology.

The mature Nejat İşler philosophy did not begin after the 2014 illness.

It did not even begin with the 2010 television crisis.

By 2007, İşler was already saying that his goal was to buy time, not property.

He was already uncomfortable with celebrity.

Already distinguishing money-making television from more meaningful theatre and cinema.

Already imagining a future organized around greater autonomy.

Already talking about death as the final limit on accumulation.

The later story is therefore not one of sudden conversion.

It is a story of implementation.

The young-to-middle-aged İşler already knows much of what he wants.

The following decade is largely about finding a practical way to live according to it.