Amacım Bırakıp Gitmek

Amacım Bırakıp Gitmek

Milliyet — 25 January 2010
Interview by İlknur Taş

In January 2010, Nejat İşler sounded tired.

Not tired of acting itself.

That distinction is important.

He sounded tired of the system surrounding acting: television schedules, celebrity culture, intrusive journalism and an industry that demanded more of his time than he wanted to give.

His departure from the television series Kapalıçarşı had produced rumors.

Some reports claimed that he had been removed because of alcohol or disciplinary problems.

İşler rejected that explanation.

But the interview quickly became about something much larger than one television series.

When asked whether he could simply leave the profession behind, his answer was striking:

“Amacım bırakıp gitmek.”

His aim, he said, was to leave.

The Problem Is Not Istanbul

The natural follow-up question was whether he wanted to leave Istanbul.

His answer reveals an important distinction that will appear repeatedly in his later life.

Istanbul was not the problem.

The industry was.

He said that he wanted to get out of the “piyasa” — the professional system around him.

This word is important.

In Turkish cultural language, piyasa means more than a workplace.

It can suggest:

• commercial pressure,
• professional networks,
• publicity,
• competition,
• constant production,
• career management,
• visibility,
• the social machinery surrounding creative work.

İşler was not announcing a philosophical rejection of acting.

He was describing a desire to escape that machinery.

This difference becomes essential when his later interviews are read chronologically.

Fame Without the Desire to Be Famous

The interview also contains one of the clearest early statements of İşler’s attitude toward celebrity.

He says that journalists and actors should meet because of the work.

A film.

A series.

A performance.

That relationship makes sense to him.

But simply walking down the street, in his view, should not automatically become news.

He says directly that he does not like being popular.

This is already much stronger than his position in 2003.

During the Gülbeyaz period, fame was still something happening around him.

The entertainment industry was beginning to describe him as a new leading man, while İşler tried to return attention to the profession itself.

By 2010, the discomfort is explicit.

He has now experienced enough celebrity culture to know that he does not want all of it.

Privacy as a Boundary

His criticism of the press is also more specific than a general complaint about journalists.

He distinguishes between people who invite publicity and people who do not.

Some celebrities, he says, inform journalists where they are going and actively request coverage.

He has no problem with journalists covering those people.

His argument is simpler:

If someone does not invite that attention, leave that person alone.

Beyond that point, he considers the attention harassment.

This is an important early statement of a boundary that will remain consistent throughout his public life.

İşler does not demand invisibility.

He accepts publicity connected to professional work.

What he resists is the idea that becoming an actor means permanently surrendering ordinary privacy.

What Happened on Kapalıçarşı?

His departure from Kapalıçarşı had generated a more damaging narrative.

According to some reports, İşler had arrived on set drunk or behaved without discipline.

He rejects this.

His explanation is about workload.

Before the series began, he says, he warned the producer that he did not like working continuously.

He could continue if the schedule remained manageable.

Instead, according to İşler, he had only around ten days off during approximately five months of production.

At that point, he says, everything was finished for him.

This is important because the conflict is not simply:

actor versus producer.

It is part of a broader argument about television production.

İşler is asking how much of a person’s life a television series should be allowed to consume.

Television as an Industrial Problem

A separate television appearance immediately after this interview makes his position even clearer.

Speaking on Cinemania, İşler criticized working conditions on television sets so strongly that he joked that actors and crews could take the conditions to the European Court of Human Rights and win.

He also said that he had already sworn off television after Bıçak Sırtı, before being persuaded to appear in Kapalıçarşı.

The problem was therefore not limited to one difficult production.

It was structural.

Turkish television required very long episodes.

Long episodes required extremely long shoots.

The production schedule consumed the week.

For an actor like İşler, who increasingly valued control over his own time, this system was becoming incompatible with the life he wanted.

An Early Philosophy of Time

In 2010, İşler does not yet use the phrase that will become central seven years later:

“I want to buy time.”

But the underlying idea is already here.

Why does he dislike the television system?

Because it occupies too much of his life.

Why does he want to leave the market?

Because professional success is beginning to remove control over his own time.

This allows the 2010 interview to be connected directly with the philosophy he describes in 2017.

The later Nejat İşler will explain that money is useful when it allows him to work less and recover ownership of his time.

The earlier Nejat İşler is already suffering from the opposite condition:

success that leaves no time to own.

The Alcohol Narrative

The interview is also an early example of another recurring conflict.

İşler had already developed a public image connected with alcohol.

When he objected to working conditions, the dispute was easily translated into a familiar celebrity narrative:

Nejat İşler drinks.

Nejat İşler is difficult.

Nejat İşler is unreliable.

His response is sarcastic.

Once someone has acquired a reputation, he suggests, the reputation becomes almost impossible to remove.

More importantly, he connects the accusation with the act of demanding better conditions.

In his version of events:

asking for boundaries becomes evidence of being difficult.

This conflict will recur in different forms throughout his career.

Not Laziness

At first glance, İşler’s statement that he does not like working too much can sound like simple laziness.

His broader career makes that interpretation difficult to sustain.

By 2010 he had already worked extensively in:

• theatre,
• television,
• cinema.

He would continue acting for many years.

He would later write books, become involved with Gümüşlükspor and eventually enter film production.

The issue seems less about avoiding effort than about refusing continuous occupation.

He wants work to have an end.

He wants life outside work to remain possible.

That distinction becomes increasingly explicit after his 2014 health crisis.

Before the Health Crisis

This may be the most important historical value of the interview.

A simplified version of Nejat İşler’s biography can easily be constructed like this:

He worked intensely.

He became seriously ill in 2014.

He nearly died.

He moved toward Gümüşlük.

He changed his priorities.

There is truth in that sequence.

But it is incomplete.

This 2010 interview proves that the desire to withdraw from the entertainment industry existed years before the health crisis.

He was already uncomfortable with:

• constant production,
• celebrity visibility,
• lack of privacy,
• exhausting television schedules,
• the professional market surrounding acting.

The illness did not invent these feelings.

It would later transform their urgency.

2010 Versus 2015

Five years later, İşler would make the distinction even clearer.

He announced that television series were finished for him while cinema would continue.

At the same time, he insisted that he would remain an actor until death.

That later statement helps us interpret the apparent contradiction in this 2010 interview.

When İşler says:

“My aim is to leave.”

he does not necessarily mean:

“I never want to act again.”

What he increasingly wants to leave is a particular system of working.

This distinction is central to the archive.

2010 Versus 2017

The comparison with 2017 is even more revealing.

In 2010:

I want to get out of the market.

In 2017:

I want to buy time.

The first statement defines the problem.

The second defines the philosophy that develops from it.

By then, Gümüşlük, reduced interest in property and a different relationship with money will become part of the same search.

Freedom is increasingly measured not by fame or wealth but by:

how much of his own time belongs to him.

An Unexpected Return to Television

There is also an irony in the immediate aftermath of the interview.

Despite saying that he wanted to withdraw and hoped television work would not arrive, he soon accepted another television role when the production offered more manageable working conditions.

This actually strengthens rather than weakens his argument.

It suggests that he was not making a dramatic declaration that he would never appear on television again.

His objection was conditional.

If the conditions changed, he could work.

The enemy was not the camera.

It was the loss of control.

The Pattern Is Becoming Clear

By 2010, several themes that will dominate the later Nejat İşler archive are already visible:

work without worshipping career

fame without wanting celebrity

money without making accumulation the purpose

acting without surrendering life to the industry

visibility with boundaries

freedom as control over time

These ideas are not yet organized into a coherent personal philosophy.

That comes later.

But the structure is already present.

From Leading Man to Outsider

The distance from 2003 is remarkable.

In 2003, the entertainment industry was announcing a new star.

Seven years later, that star was talking about escaping the system that had made him one.

This does not mean that fame had been a mistake.

It means that İşler increasingly understood professional success as something that could produce a new form of dependence.

A successful actor could earn more money.

Receive more offers.

Become more visible.

And consequently have less control over his own life.

That paradox will become one of the central philosophical problems of his later interviews.

Why This Interview Matters

The January 2010 Milliyet interview is one of the most important early documents in Nejat İşler’s archive because it prevents a misleading interpretation of his later life.

His withdrawal from Istanbul-centered celebrity culture did not begin with his 2014 health crisis.

Four years earlier, he was already openly saying that:

• he disliked popularity,
• he wanted privacy,
• television working conditions were exhausting,
• his problem was with the professional market,
• and he wanted to leave it.

The later move toward Gümüşlük should therefore be understood not as a sudden transformation but partly as the realization of a much older desire.

The health crisis would change the scale and urgency of that desire.

It did not create it.

Perhaps the most important sentence in the interview is therefore also one of the simplest:

“Amacım bırakıp gitmek.”

In 2010, İşler still does not know exactly what the alternative life will look like.

But he already knows what he wants less of.