Gerçek Can Acıtıyorsa Acıtacak

Gerçek Can Acıtıyorsa Acıtacak

Cumhuriyet Pazar — 13 November 2022
Interview by Deniz Ülkütekin

Two days after the Gazete Oksijen interview, Nejat İşler appeared in another substantial conversation about Tamirhane.

This time he was interviewed together with the film’s director, Erkan Kolçak Köstendil.

The result is useful because it moves away from biography and toward a larger question:

What has happened to the distinction between good and bad people?

Tamirhane begins in a world that seems almost inherited from old Turkish cinema.

Friendship.

Neighborhood loyalty.

Ordinary people.

Simple forms of goodness.

Then that world collides with contemporary reality.

İşler’s summary is bleak:

“İyilik out, kötülük in.”

He immediately notes that he does not actually believe in or approve of the phrase.

He uses it to describe the age.

Yılmaz as an Old-Fashioned Good Person

İşler plays Yılmaz.

Asked how he approached the character, he does not begin with complex psychological theory.

He describes him as a simple neighborhood boy.

That world is familiar.

İşler grew up in Eyüp and says he thought about the older boys he admired there during his childhood.

Then he makes a striking observation.

He suggests that the 1970s still contained people of the kind Yılmaz represents.

In his view, such goodness has become much harder to find.

He describes Yılmaz almost as:

a good person left behind from the 1970s or 1980s.

This gives the character a historical dimension.

Yılmaz is not merely naïve.

He belongs to an older moral language.

Eyüp Returns Again

Eyüp has appeared repeatedly throughout the archive.

It functions as more than birthplace.

It is a memory reservoir.

When İşler needs to construct Yılmaz, he does not search abstractly for “goodness.”

He remembers actual people.

Older boys from the neighborhood.

Gestures.

Types.

Relationships.

This fits perfectly with the acting philosophy described in the Episode interview:

acting begins with observing human beings rather than performing labels.

Goodness Is Also a Character

The interesting reversal here is that İşler applies the same method to goodness that he previously applied to evil.

With Ercüment:

do not play “bad.”

Find the human being.

With Yılmaz:

do not play “good.”

Find a person whose world makes that goodness believable.

The method remains consistent.

Moral category comes second.

Character comes first.

The Impossible Good Person

The interviewer suggests that the film asks what would happen if older forms of human relationship were placed inside today’s society.

İşler’s answer is immediate:

it would be impossible.

This is perhaps the interview’s most pessimistic idea.

The film does not simply place a good man among bad people.

It asks whether the social conditions required for that kind of goodness still exist.

That is a much larger question.

Yeşilçam and Moral Clarity

The conversation naturally turns toward Yeşilçam.

Older popular cinema often used morally clear characters.

Good people.

Bad people.

Neighborhood solidarity.

Friendship.

Sacrifice.

Modern audiences can easily dismiss this structure as simplistic.

But Tamirhane appears to ask another question:

what if the simplicity reflected not only cinematic convention but a different social imagination?

Erkan Kolçak Köstendil argues that earlier filmmakers looked directly at people around them.

The implication is uncomfortable.

If cinema’s people are darker today, perhaps cinema did not create the change.

Perhaps society changed first.

“Gerçek Can Acıtıyorsa Acıtacak”

This is where the interview’s headline enters.

Köstendil states:

“Gerçek can acıtıyorsa acıtacak.”

Reality will hurt if reality hurts.

Although the sentence belongs to Köstendil, it fits remarkably well with İşler’s own filmography.

Barda did not soften violence.

9,75 did not transform the 1990s into uncomplicated nostalgia.

Tamirhane does not protect supposedly good characters from moral compromise.

Truth does not have to comfort the audience.

“İyilik Out, Kötülük In”

İşler responds to the moral discussion with deliberate irony.

Using fashionable language, he says:

“İyilik ‘out’, kötülük ‘in’.”

The phrase sounds humorous.

Its content is not.

He sees evil as increasingly normalized.

The most disturbing part comes immediately afterward.

The problem is not simply that people do bad things.

It is that people can believe those things are good.

Reflexive Evil and Organized Evil

İşler makes a particularly useful distinction between the film’s morally compromised characters.

One reacts badly.

The other operates in a more organized way.

That distinction matters.

Not all wrongdoing has the same structure.

One kind can emerge through:

panic,

anger,

fear,

impulse.

Another becomes:

planned,

rationalized,

systematic.

This returns us to a theme present since Barda.

Violence and evil become most dangerous when they acquire explanation and organization.

Evil Rarely Calls Itself Evil

İşler’s comment that people can believe bad actions are actually good is perhaps the deepest statement in the interview.

A society becomes especially dangerous when moral language itself changes.

People no longer need to say:

I know this is wrong, but I will do it anyway.

They can say:

what I am doing is right.

Once that happens, conscience stops functioning as resistance.

This idea connects strongly with Ercüment Çözer.

Ercüment does not experience himself as a cartoon villain.

He has his own logic.

From Barda to Tamirhane

The chronology is revealing.

2007 — Barda

How does violence become possible?

↓

Episode / Ercüment

Do not play the bad person merely as bad.

↓

2022 — Oksijen

Audiences are attracted to bad characters.

↓

2022 — Cumhuriyet

The language of the age itself increasingly rewards badness.

The subject has expanded.

It begins as character psychology.

It becomes cultural diagnosis.

Nostalgia Without Idealization

The reference to the 1970s and 1980s could easily become simple nostalgia.

People were good then.

People are bad now.

But the film complicates that.

Yılmaz himself has flaws.

His environment is not innocent.

The story emerges from people who are already trapped.

So the older world is not presented as paradise.

What İşler seems to miss is a particular form of relationship.

Neighborhood recognition.

Loyalty.

A shared language.

“Biz Babadan Böyle Gördük”

The film repeatedly uses the idea:

“Biz babadan böyle gördük.”

But the characters are orphans.

That contradiction is deliberate.

They have inherited rules without actually having traditional family structures.

Their moral world is constructed from:

older boys,

institutions,

neighborhood codes,

people who temporarily cared for them.

This makes their morality fragile.

They are trying to live by inherited instructions inside a world that no longer supports those instructions.

Acting from Circumstance

Asked about Yılmaz’s sudden emotional explosions, İşler again avoids abstract performance language.

He remembers that the character spends all day around paint thinner.

He remembers that these men came from an orphanage.

He imagines what may have happened there.

He keeps those circumstances in mind.

This is another excellent example of his technique.

Behavior first needs conditions.

Why does the person behave this way?

What world produced the behavior?

No Character Exists Alone

This approach helps explain İşler’s best performances.

The character is not an isolated psychological object.

He comes from:

a neighborhood,

a childhood,

a class,

a workplace,

relationships,

trauma.

This is a social acting method as much as a psychological one.

The Team Lived Together Before the Film

The interview also contains valuable production history.

Köstendil explains that İşler played a major role in bringing the cast together before shooting.

The actors stayed together at a summer house for roughly ten days.

They read.

Discussed.

Argued about the material.

Later they continued rehearsals in Istanbul.

This significantly enriches the T24 conversation from four days earlier.

There, the team structure was visible.

Here we learn that İşler actively helped create that structure.

From Solitary Persona to Ensemble Builder

This is important.

The public image says:

solitary outsider.

The production reality shows:

someone helping organize group concentration.

Köstendil specifically credits İşler with helping bring the actors together around the project.

That is almost the opposite of the difficult, isolated celebrity stereotype.

Belonging to the Location

İşler says that once they felt they belonged to the repair shop location, the work was effectively done.

The actors sometimes even slept there at night.

The important word is:

belonging.

Again, performance comes through environment.

Do not merely imitate workers in a repair shop.

Spend enough time there that the place begins to feel ordinary.

Acting by Occupying a World

This gives us another concise summary of İşler’s method:

observe the person, understand the circumstances, inhabit the place.

That principle links:

Eyüp memories,

Barda,

Ercüment,

Yılmaz.

It is much more coherent than describing his acting simply as natural or charismatic.

Friendship Is Not Enough

The film’s team clearly enjoyed working together.

But both İşler and Köstendil understand that enjoyment can become dangerous.

If actors are having more fun than the story allows, the film can lose discipline.

So even a friendly ensemble needs control.

This is a subtle but important idea.

Creative freedom is not absence of structure.

A Useful Comparison with the T24 Interview

The 9 November T24 conversation showed the collective nature of Tamirhane.

The 13 November Cumhuriyet interview goes deeper.

T24:

these people made a film together.

Cumhuriyet:

here is how they created a shared world before shooting.

The two files should therefore remain separate.

They document different layers.

A Useful Comparison with Oksijen

The Oksijen interview two days earlier asks:

why does the audience love bad characters?

The Cumhuriyet interview asks something even broader:

what if badness has become culturally normal?

These are complementary questions.

One concerns spectatorship.

The other concerns society.

The Good Character as Late-Career Challenge

Yılmaz is also important in İşler’s own career.

His public image has been built strongly around darker characters.

Playing an unusually good character creates a different kind of challenge.

Can an actor associated with moral darkness make goodness convincing without making it foolish?

The film deliberately tests that question.

Why This Interview Matters

The 13 November 2022 Cumhuriyet Pazar interview is important because it takes several of Nejat İşler’s long-running themes and moves them from individual psychology into social analysis.

Earlier interviews asked:

How do I play a bad person?

This interview asks:

What happens when society increasingly rewards badness itself?

At the same time, Yılmaz gives İşler the opposite challenge:

how do you construct a believable good person?

His answer leads back to Eyüp, childhood, neighborhood memory and the men he observed growing up.

The interview therefore reveals the same acting method from both directions.

For evil:

find the human being.

For goodness:

find the human being.

And perhaps the most valuable production detail is equally revealing:

the supposed solitary outsider helped create the collective concentration of the entire Tamirhane cast before shooting.

Public persona and professional reality diverge once again.