Barda: Şiddet, Adalet ve Sıradan İnsan

Barda: Şiddet, Adalet ve Sıradan İnsan

2007 — surviving online reproduction dated 7 September 2007

The 2007 Barda period contains more than one useful Nejat İşler interview.

The Harper’s Bazaar conversation gives us the broad social question:

Why are we unable to live together?

A second surviving interview goes further into the mechanics of violence and, more importantly, into how İşler approached Selim.

Its provenance is weaker.

The original publisher and exact interview date are not securely preserved in the accessible version.

For that reason, this entry should not be treated with the same documentary confidence as the Harper’s Bazaar file.

But the surviving text is detailed enough to add an important layer to the archive.

Not a Monster from Another World

The central acting problem in Barda is obvious.

Selim commits extreme violence.

The easy solution would be to construct him as a monster.

Someone fundamentally different from normal people.

İşler chooses the opposite approach.

To prepare for the role, he begins from the possibility that an ordinary person can become capable of killing.

This is perhaps the earliest clear formulation of the acting philosophy that will later become:

“Kötüyü kötü oynamıyorum.”

Evil Becomes More Disturbing When It Is Human

A monster provides psychological safety.

The viewer can say:

I am not that.

Selim is more uncomfortable if he belongs to the same human world as everybody else.

He has:

desires,

frustrations,

social experience,

anger,

rationalizations.

The violence remains extreme.

The person committing it does not have to come from another species.

The Metropolitan Person

İşler’s description is especially dark because he connects Selim with ordinary metropolitan life.

He suggests that city people regularly imagine things they know would be wrong to do.

Usually those thoughts remain thoughts.

Selim crosses the boundary into action.

This makes the character less exceptional.

The difference may be partly one of restraint.

Knowing People Like Selim

İşler also says that he recognizes people like the character from life and had known people who had experienced prison.

Again, the acting process begins outside abstract theory.

Observe people.

Remember people.

Construct the role from social experience.

This will remain one of the most consistent features of his later descriptions of acting.

Violence Is Easy to Explain

Asked why people become violent, İşler suggests that violence may be one of the easiest behaviors for which people can invent excuses.

People can blame:

poverty,

anger,

insult,

honor,

jealousy,

fear.

His own compressed explanation goes toward two deeper conditions:

hunger and dissatisfaction.

The wording is simple.

The implications are not.

Hunger Does Not Only Mean Food

“Hunger” can be read literally.

But beside “dissatisfaction,” it also suggests lack.

Wanting something that is absent.

Money.

Status.

Recognition.

Sex.

Control.

Security.

If human desire continually encounters frustration, violence can become one way of trying to restore power.

This is not presented as justification.

It is an attempt at explanation.

Explanation Is Not Excuse

This distinction is essential for understanding İşler’s approach to dark characters.

To understand why somebody acts violently does not mean approving the violence.

The actor has to find logic inside the person.

The audience can still judge the action.

This separation between:

understanding

and

approval

will later become central to his Ercüment Çözer performances.

Justice Changes According to Position

The surviving interview also contains one of the strongest observations about Barda.

İşler says the film is not only questioning violence.

It questions how the idea of justice changes depending on who is speaking.

The attackers.

The victims.

The judicial system.

Each can approach justice from a different position.

That makes the film morally more complicated than a simple crime narrative.

Everyone Wants Justice, but Not the Same Justice

The word sounds universal.

Justice.

But in practice, people may mean:

punishment,

revenge,

protection,

law,

restoration.

The victim and attacker do not arrive at the concept from the same place.

Neither does the court.

The film creates tension between these definitions.

Helplessness Is the Real Horror

Asked what will disturb audiences most, İşler points toward helplessness.

This is insightful.

Violence is visually disturbing.

But helplessness creates the deeper fear.

The victims cannot simply:

leave,

fight successfully,

call for effective help.

Control disappears.

That is what makes the situation terrifying.

Violence as Loss of Agency

Seen this way, Barda is not only about physical pain.

It is about someone else gaining control over:

your body,

your movement,

your time,

your fate.

This is an extreme form of a theme that appears throughout İşler’s archive:

the importance of autonomy.

Obviously, ordinary professional frustration and violent captivity are not comparable experiences.

But control remains a recurring conceptual concern.

The Entire Set Felt the Violence

İşler remembers not only actors but crew members becoming emotionally affected while filming some scenes.

This detail matters because the film’s violence was not treated as comfortable genre entertainment during production.

The aim was discomfort.

That helps explain his later disappointment when violent cinema is discussed only as spectacle.

“Good Bad Characters”

Asked whether he prefers playing good or bad people, İşler resists the choice.

Bad characters may offer actors more possibilities.

But his real preference is for characters that feel:

deep,

sincere,

real.

This statement is much more important than a preference for villains.

Complexity Before Morality

The actor’s hierarchy is:

first,

is the character real?

Then,

what moral category does the character occupy?

This explains why morally complicated roles become attractive.

They provide contradictions.

Contradiction gives the actor material.

The Beginning of the “Dark Nejat” Problem

But successful performance produces a side effect.

If İşler repeatedly becomes memorable through morally dark characters, audiences begin connecting darkness with the actor himself.

Barda is one of the key stages in that process.

The romantic figure from Aliye begins moving toward another cultural identity.

Harder.

Darker.

More dangerous.

The Actor Likes Complexity; the Audience Builds a Persona

This distinction becomes central to the whole archive.

İşler may choose Selim because the role is complex.

The audience sees:

Nejat İşler is convincing as a violent man.

Then later comes:

Kaan.

Ercüment.

The roles accumulate.

Eventually, a public identity forms.

Real-Life Violence

The surviving interview also asks whether İşler had personally used violence.

He does not present himself as completely innocent.

But he says the experience did not feel good and brought loss rather than satisfaction.

This answer is important partly because it lacks masculine pride.

He does not turn fighting into proof of toughness.

Violence Is Not Masculine Achievement

That position should be remembered when later media describes İşler through the “delikanlı” or hard-man image.

Physical aggression is often culturally used as evidence of masculinity.

His own description is much less heroic.

Violence is unpleasant.

Even defensive violence is troubling.

This complicates the public persona years before he explicitly rejects the “delikanlı” label.

A Surprising Career Complaint

Near the end of the surviving interview, the discussion moves away from Barda.

İşler says that projects sometimes change after actors commit to them.

Conditions promised before production may not remain the same during production.

If the difference becomes too large, he wants to leave.

This is extremely important.

The 2010 Conflict Is Already Visible in 2007

Three years before Kapalıçarşı, the labor problem is already present.

Promised conditions change.

The actor feels trapped.

Work becomes something he wants to escape.

The later 2010 conflict therefore does not appear suddenly.

Its roots are documented earlier.

The Cost of Unwanted Work

The surviving text uses deliberately extreme language to describe mornings when going to work felt unbearable.

The exact phrase matters less than the underlying point.

A successful acting career can contain projects the actor deeply regrets entering.

Visibility from outside does not reveal experience from inside.

Another Public/Private Gap

This mirrors the wider celebrity theme.

Public view:

successful actor,

popular television,

films,

money.

Private professional experience:

some projects become exhausting or disappointing after conditions change.

Again, visible success and lived success are not identical.

A Useful Comparison with Harper’s Bazaar

The two 2007 records work best together.

Harper’s Bazaar:

Why can people not live together?

What are violence and justice doing to society?

This surviving interview:

How does an actor construct the violent person?

How does justice change according to position?

What conditions may sit beneath violence?

The first is broader.

The second is more psychological and professional.

A Useful Comparison with 2010

The professional section is equally useful.

2007:

promised working conditions can change and make him want to leave.

2010:

he openly attacks the structure of television production.

The chronology shows escalation rather than sudden rebellion.

A Useful Comparison with Episode

The longest arc is even more interesting.

2007:
An ordinary person can become capable of terrible violence.

Episode period:
“I do not play the bad person as simply bad.”

The later slogan is already present here in practice.

The method existed before İşler gave it such a concise name.

A Useful Comparison with 2022

In 2022, İşler returns to Barda and says its warning did not achieve what they hoped.

By then, the issue is no longer merely:

how do we understand violence?

It is:

why has society continued normalizing it?

This gives Barda an unusual twenty-year life inside the archive.

The film becomes something İşler repeatedly uses to think about society.

Why This Record Matters

This surviving 2007 interview is valuable because it contains an early version of two ideas that later become central to Nejat İşler’s career.

The first is his acting method:

do not begin with “this person is evil.”

Begin with the human being and the conditions that make the behavior possible.

The second is his professional dissatisfaction:

the conditions promised at the beginning of a production can change, and success does not make bad working conditions acceptable.

The first leads toward Ercüment Çözer.

The second leads toward his 2010 rebellion against television production.

Together, they make this imperfectly preserved source worth keeping.