Bu Film Kayıp Yılların Fotoğrafı

Bu Film Kayıp Yılların Fotoğrafı

Akşam — 27 March 2011
Interview by Sibel Ateş Yengin
With Nejat İşler and Yiğit Özşener

Two days after Kaybedenler Kulübü entered cinemas, Nejat İşler and Yiğit Özşener sat down with Sibel Ateş Yengin to talk not only about the film but about the decade it represented.

The surviving version, reproduced by T24, identifies the original as an Akşam interview published on 27 March 2011. It moves between memories of the 1990s, changing friendships, consumer culture, death, love and the meaning of being a “loser.”

For Nejat İşler, the film is more than a story about two radio hosts.

He calls it:

“kayıp yılların fotoğrafı.”

A photograph of lost years.

Before Kaan Became a Myth

This interview is especially valuable because it catches Kaybedenler Kulübü before years of audience mythology accumulated around it.

Kaan Çaydamlı had not yet become one of the characters most strongly identified with İşler.

The film was new.

The cultural image was still forming.

That makes the interview useful for separating:

the actual memories İşler brought to the film

from

the identity audiences later built around him.

The 1990s Were Lived Experience

Asked about the 1990s, İşler remembers selling books from a street stand in Teşvikiye.

He describes himself as deeply inside rock culture.

He dreamed about forming a band.

He wrote plays.

He remembers those years as an unusually free period in his twenties.

This matters because Kaybedenler Kulübü was not a historical world he approached from outside.

It overlapped with his own youth.

The Street Stand as Freedom

His description of the book stand is revealing.

The attraction was not only bookselling.

It was control.

You opened when you wanted.

Closed when you wanted.

Worked outside.

Occupied a fashionable Istanbul street without belonging to a conventional office structure.

That small memory already contains a theme that will dominate much later interviews:

control over one’s time.

Before “Buy Time”

In 2017, İşler would define his mature philosophy as wanting to buy time.

The 1990s memory shows an earlier, instinctive version of the same preference.

The street stand offered little conventional security.

But it offered autonomy.

This suggests that his later philosophy did not begin with wealth or illness.

It had roots in youth.

Missing Three Years

One of the funniest memories is also strangely meaningful.

İşler recalls once saying he was twenty years old, only to be reminded that he was actually twenty-three.

He jokes that the years between 1992 and 1995 seemed almost missing from his memory.

The remark is humorous.

But it fits the film perfectly.

These are “lost years” in more than one sense.

Years lived intensely enough to resist clean chronology.

Relationships Were Slower

When the conversation turns to friendship, İşler argues that relationships were not consumed as quickly in the 1990s.

He connects the change partly with technologies designed to make communication easier.

People once made a plan and simply appeared.

Now, he suggests, people keep alternatives open until the last moment.

The criticism is not really anti-technology.

It is about behavior.

Everyone Waits for a Better Option

One of the strongest observations is that people now seem to ask:

Could something more valuable appear?

A meeting.

A friend.

A plan.

Everything remains provisional.

The modern person is always evaluating alternatives.

This is surprisingly close to İşler’s later criticism of accumulation.

More options do not necessarily produce greater freedom.

They can make commitment harder.

Consumer Logic Enters Friendship

The interview therefore describes something larger than changing technology.

Market logic has entered relationships.

People compare possibilities.

Optimize.

Delay commitment.

Search for maximum benefit.

Friendship begins behaving like consumption.

This makes the film’s 1990s nostalgia more interesting than simple affection for old music or old Istanbul.

A Transition Generation

İşler explicitly calls his generation a transition generation.

He says Kaybedenler Kulübü had already photographed these “lost years” in advance.

The phrase suggests that the film is not merely nostalgic.

It documents a movement between two social worlds.

Before:

slower relationships,

fewer communication tools,

different forms of urban culture.

After:

greater speed,

greater choice,

greater individual optimization.

The Özal Generation

The interview also recalls labels applied to their generation after 1980.

İşler mentions being called part of the “Özal children” or “1980 generation,” and notes that the radio characters themselves joke about their supposed political apathy.

This is important because Kaybedenler Kulübü can appear completely apolitical if viewed only through:

sex,

radio,

drinking,

male friendship.

The interview suggests more self-awareness than that.

Irony as Political Distance

The characters do not necessarily respond to politics through direct activism.

They often respond through irony.

That does not mean they are unaware.

It may mean they do not trust serious ideological performance.

This style of self-mockery is one of the cultural qualities both actors associate with the period.

What Is a Loser?

When asked to define a loser, the conversation turns toward death.

Yiğit Özşener asks what people actually gain and at what cost.

İşler gives the discussion its most existential line:

“Ölümün olduğu yerde daha ciddi ne olabilir ki?”

If death exists, what can really be more serious than that?

This is remarkable when placed in the later archive.

Mortality Before the Illness

The statement comes three years before İşler’s major 2014 health crisis.

That is crucial.

It proves that mortality was already part of his thinking.

The illness did not invent his awareness of death.

It changed the intensity and personal urgency of an existing theme.

Enough

İşler then reduces human satisfaction to something deliberately primitive.

Eat.

Drink.

Have sex.

If basic drives are satisfied, perhaps that should be enough.

The outside world, he says, does not see it that way.

This is another early appearance of an idea that becomes central later:

enough.

Before the Philosophy of Enough

The later chronology now becomes clearer.

2011: Why is basic satisfaction not enough?

2012: What does success even mean?

2017: Use money to buy time rather than endlessly accumulate.

2025: The best inheritance may be memories rather than property.

These are not separate thoughts.

They form a long argument against endless expansion.

A Straight Line Toward Death

Asked how close he is to the person he once wanted to become, İşler gives another darkly comic answer.

He says he made a decision at sixteen and drew his own line.

The destination is already known:

eventually we die.

He says he has largely continued along the path he chose for himself.

Again, mortality functions not as tragedy but orientation.

Success Is Not the Destination

If the end is death, then career cannot be the final destination.

Career is something that happens on the route.

That may explain why İşler has always sounded suspicious of conventional ambition.

Winning the game does not change how the game ends.

Kaan and Nejat Were Close Enough to Be Dangerous

Later in the conversation, İşler says that he and Özşener enjoyed the characters partly because they felt close to them.

This matters.

There was genuine cultural and emotional overlap.

But overlap is not identity.

The later problem is that audiences would increasingly collapse the distinction.

A Role Becomes Biography

The public begins to read Kaan as evidence about Nejat.

Relationships.

Women.

Nightlife.

Masculinity.

Freedom.

The film becomes one of the strongest engines of the later Nejat İşler mythology.

This 2011 interview shows why the confusion was easy.

The actor himself recognized parts of his own youth in the world of the character.

But he never says that Kaan is simply himself.

Women and Fidelity

The joint interview also includes extensive discussion of relationships.

İşler says that when he is genuinely in a relationship and regularly seeing someone, he does not feel a need for another woman.

If he is unattached, he sees no reason to artificially impose the same limit.

This is useful because it is less dramatic than the public womanizer mythology later attached to Kaan and Nejat.

The actual position is conditional rather than ideological.

The Interview Itself Helps Build the Persona

However, the prominence given to women, sex and male freedom also demonstrates how the persona was produced.

The film contains these themes.

The interview asks about them.

The answers generate headlines.

The public image strengthens.

Celebrity identity is therefore co-produced by:

role,

journalism,

audience,

actor.

“Very Lonely”

Near the end of the interview, İşler predicts that one of the film’s phrases — “çok yalnızım” — will become particularly memorable.

Then he reveals that one of the first plays he wrote was called Yalnızlık Benim Gizli Sevgilim.

This is a remarkable early connection between his writing and the later public theme of loneliness.

But He Says He Was Never Alone

Immediately afterward, İşler complicates the image.

He says:

“Ben hiç yalnız kalmadım.”

He explains that he has remained around people with awareness and has accumulated people throughout his life, while they probably accumulated him too.

This is one of the most important early statements for understanding his later solitude philosophy.

Solitude Is Already Complicated in 2011

He is interested in loneliness.

He writes about loneliness.

He plays characters associated with loneliness.

Yet he says he has not actually lived in complete isolation.

This strongly anticipates the 2025 MediaCat distinction:

he can be alone,

but participation in life depends on people.

Not a Hermit

The final section makes the point even clearer.

Asked whether he wants to abandon everything and disappear, İşler says he is not really a hermit.

Changing place and environment is good for him.

That distinction later becomes extremely important with Gümüşlük.

Moving away does not equal retreat from humanity.

Gümüşlük Before Gümüşlük

This 2011 statement almost predicts the later move.

He likes changing:

place,

environment,

social circulation.

Four years later, Gümüşlük will become the major example.

But even then, as later interviews show, he remains socially involved.

Football.

Friends.

Community.

Film.

The 2011 remark proves that the pattern existed earlier.

A Useful Comparison with the Esquire Interview

The Esquire interview from the same period focuses more strongly on:

Kaan,

ambition,

the idea of the loser,

football,

the public Nejat persona.

The Akşam conversation offers a different emphasis.

It gives us:

the 1990s,

consumer culture,

friendship,

mortality,

loneliness.

The two records are therefore complementary rather than repetitive.

A Useful Comparison with 2017

The strongest connection is probably time.

2011 remembers an earlier life in which a street seller could control when the shop opened and closed.

2017 formalizes the mature version:

buy time.

The scale changes.

The preference does not.

A Useful Comparison with 2025

The loneliness discussion becomes even more powerful in retrospect.

2011:

“I have never really been alone; I accumulated people.”

2025:

“I can remain alone, but I need another person to participate in life.”

Fourteen years apart, these statements describe almost the same emotional structure.

Why This Interview Matters

The 27 March 2011 Akşam interview is one of the most useful early documents for understanding what Kaybedenler Kulübü actually meant to Nejat İşler before the film became a cultural myth.

For him, the film was a photograph of a transition.

The 1990s represented:

youth,

rock culture,

street work,

slower friendship,

less optimization,

and a different relationship with time.

The interview also contains ideas that will later become central to his philosophy:

• mortality predates the 2014 illness,
• conventional success is not an obvious goal,
• basic sufficiency may matter more than accumulation,
• freedom is connected with control over time,
• loneliness does not mean total isolation,
• changing place is different from disappearing.

Perhaps the most important archival lesson is that Kaybedenler Kulübü did not create all of these themes.

It recognized themes already present in İşler’s life.

That recognition is one reason Kaan and Nejat later became so difficult for the public to separate.