法提阿金（Fatih Akin）1973年出生於德國漢堡(Hamburg), 是土耳其裔的德國移民第二代; 【天堂邊緣】(The Edge of Heaven / Auf der anderen Seite: 人生的彼端) 為法提阿金(Fatih Akin)生命三部曲「愛、死亡、魔鬼三部曲」(Love, Death and the Devil)之二, 暴力和寬容, 生與死, 人生的驟變與回歸等題材; 在電影裡他的出生地漢堡和土耳其家鄉Filyos的地標都出現在大銀幕上. 【靈魂餐廳】(Soul Kitchen, 2009)是一部描繪親情、友情、愛情、信任與忠誠的電影獲威尼斯影展評審獎 . 以下是他對自己的電影【愛無止境】【天堂邊緣】和【靈魂餐廳】的看法.
1: Why did you choose Birol Ünel?---I was totally fascinated by this guy, similar to how people are fascinated by Kurt Cobain or James Dean, or Brando; guys that are so brilliant and talented that they become self-destructive. We liked each other from the start. We are both Turkish, so we have the same background, but he gives a shit about traditions. I looked at him and thought: "Why can he do that? Why am I not allowed to do that?" That was a big inspiration for the film.
2: What's your film about? ---In the end, it's a film about love. It's part of the "love death devil" trilogy. It's about love in both its constructive and destructive forms. It's about death, also about death as metamorphosis, entering another plane of consciousness. And it's about the evil in yourself, about the demon in yourself, the desire.
3: Why/how does Cahit become evil?---I think that's the dark, negative side of love. The dark side of it can makes us very destructive. It can give us strength, which is what happens in the movie - in the beginning he's a dead man, basically a zombie. He's being reawakened, kissed back to life, so to speak, by her. But this strength has also a negativity, a possessiveness. That's how humans are, how we all are, when it comes to love, to the essential stuff. I'd say when it comes to pussy.
4: Do you have to be Turkish to understand this film?---During writing and making this film, there were three points of view I sort of switched around in. The German-German view, basically that of the moneygivers, the sponsors. The Turkish-German view, the one that's closest to mine. And the Turkish-Turkish view, the Istanbul perspective. We make stuff here that they might think is crap, they make stuff over there that we don't understand. I tried finding the biggest possible intersection between.
5:What significance does Istanbul have for you?---For me it's the Holy City. And Babylon at the same time. It's a city full of contradictions, it's a lunatic city, it's very big and dangerous, it's very exhausting, it's a very beautiful, very charming city. It's THE city for me. That's not Rome, that's Istanbul for me.
6.: What's special about filming in Istanbul?---The scenery is amazing. It's fun to challenge yourself how to film in the streets with masses of people without them knowing, without them looking into the camera. That makes it a lot more authentic, when we hide the camera. When Sibel walks down the streets, those are all real people, they're not extras. The city is flowing, which is very inspiring. When Sibel gets stabbed and a cat randomly enters the frame, that wasn't a trained cat.
7.: Does THE German society/culture still exist?---All the politicians can tell me what they want, Germany is a bilingual country now (I think he just means multicultural but didn't want to use the word). Many different languages are spoken here. And Atatürk always said: "Every language is like a person, a culture, a lifestyle." That's what we try to capture witht he camera.
8.: Why is there no happy-end?---If she had gone with him, I wouldn't find that honest. That would be cheating on the viewers, on the story, and also on the characters.(Aalyandra on you tube)
I put so much into the making of HEAD-ON (GEGEN DIE WAND), that when I finished, I had no idea what to do next. On my previous films, I had always known what I was doing next before finishing the current one. So there I was in this bad situation not knowing what to do. Ironically, to make matters worse, HEAD-ON became a big success for me. I wasn’t expecting it. As great as it was, success doesn’t make everything easier. I got even more blocked. I felt pressured to come up with something better than HEAD-ON. I wanted to do better artistically. I had to prove to myself that HEAD-ON wasn’t the best I could do. I relate a lot of things to sports, so I kept thinking that I didn’t want to go out in the first round. I was faced with the challenge of following up HEAD-ON. Being faster than Carl Lewis. Being Ben Johnson.
BECOMING A PARENT
Becoming a parent had a huge impact on me. My son was born in 2005. Suddenly I had to be more responsible and think about tomorrow. Before I was just a rock ’n’ roll kind of guy. The birth of my son eased a lot of the creative pressure I was under. It definitely affected my writing. Teaching at a university in Hamburg, sharing my experiences with students, that also helped. Making the documentary CROSSING THE BRIDGE also helped ease the pressure. Going to Turkey, meeting all those singers and musicians, that was like therapy.
MY HOMEWORK
Filmmaking is a big part of my life, but it pales next to issues like birth, love and death. To really grow up, I felt I had to make three films. Call it a trilogy if you want to, but it’s basically three films that belong together because of their themes of love, death and evil. HEAD-ON was about love. THE EDGE OF HEAVEN is about death. Death in the sense of every death is a birth. Like both death and birth open doors to other dimensions. With THE EDGE OF HEAVEN, I feel like I’m reaching some other level, but something is still missing that will be in the third film about evil. I just feel like I have to tell something to the end. These three films are kind of my homework, then I can move on. Maybe move on to genre films, film noir, western, even horror.
THE ART OF LOVING
Erich Fromm’s “The Art of Loving” influenced me a lot. I’m fascinated by human relationships. Not just boy meets girl or in a sexual sense, but also between parents and children. All human relationships. I believe that all the wars in the world are the result of not using love in the way that humanity should. I think evil is the product of laziness. It’s easier to hate someone than to love them.
SHOOTING IN TURKEY
I finally started shooting on May 1, 2006. THE EDGE OF HEAVEN was shot in Germany – Bremen and Hamburg, and in Turkey – Istanbul, the Black Sea Coast and Trabzon. The shoot lasted about 10 weeks. For a filmmaker, Turkey is a great place to shoot. Shooting in Germany is much less interesting. It can be attractive, but you have to look hard or create it. The light is extraordinary in Turkey because of its geographic position. For me, shooting in Istanbul is like shooting in New York. They’re both attractive and cosmopolitan. Each city is a megalopolis. I love to shoot in cities. I’m a big city child. It’s what I know. In THE EDGE OF HEAVEN, the city of Istanbul is actually a character. Since she doesn’t speak the language, foreigner Lotte becomes lost as she confronts Istanbul. But I also wanted to break the urban image with scenes in the countryside and the coast.
IN BETWEEN TWO CULTURES
I have this Turkish background and I have this German background. I was born in Germany, but I’m in between the two cultures. Educated in Europe, but also raised in Turkish by my parents. Turkish culture has always been a part of my life. I traveled to Turkey with my family every summer since I was a kid. Since I’m in between these two cultures, it’s natural that my films are in between, too.
LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH TURKEY
I have this love-hate relationship with Turkey, a very complicated relationship. I became much more interested in Turkey after I finished school in 1995. I decided to make my first short film there, WEED in 1996. I saw another face of Turkey and I became more and more fascinated. I became more Turkish. With every meter of film I shoot in Turkey, I try to understand the country more and more. But the more I understand it, the more it makes me sad. I hate the politics, the nationalism. Look at what is happening in that country. History repeating itself. The same mistakes again and again. I love that country, but shooting in Turkey takes a lot of energy, tears and blood.
TURKISH BUREAUCRACY
The image of Turkish bureaucracy in THE EDGE OF HEAVEN isn’t harsh, it’s Kafkaesque. This is not criticism, it’s truth without comment. In the film, when the political activist is arrested in front of Ayten, the happy crowd applauses. The sad thing is that this happened naturally in rehearsal, the extras just automatically clapped. This really only happens when those arrested are considered to be “enemies of the state”. Fascism is alive and well in the streets of Istanbul.
COUNT THE TURKISH FLAGS
There are a lot of Turkish flags seen in THE EDGE OF HEAVEN. Go ahead and count them. I guess the nationalists will interpret that as a sign of love for Turkey, but I didn’t put one in. They were all already there. I didn’t change the locations. I shot them the way they were. Maybe I went too far, there are so many Turkish flags!
INTELLIGENCE IS SEXY
I think intelligence is sexy, so I made the character of Nejat a professor. And a German professor of Turkish origin breaks certain clichés which still exist in Germany. Turks today play a significant role in German culture, politics and science. They’re not just hustling in the streets. For Yeter, education is important enough for her to prostitute herself to provide one for her daughter. Nejat can relate to this desire for knowledge. I liked the irony that when Nejat goes to Istanbul he trades places with a German intellectual running a bookstore.
EDUCATION CAN SAVE THE WORLD
Literacy, education, plays a profound role in THE EDGE OF HEAVEN. A book is a key image in the conflict between Nejat and his father. Which book to show? It was a very difficult decision for me. I didn’t want “Siddartha” or “The Hobbit” or anything too full of some parallel meaning. So I thought I would advertise my friend’s fantastic book. I chose “Die Tochter des Schmieds (The Blacksmith’s Daughter)” by Selim Özdogan. In regards to the film, the key element is about reading. Reading stands for education. And education is the only thing that can save the world.
HANNA AND TUNCEL
I imagined this German mother coming to Istanbul looking for her missing daughter. I had this image early on with Hanna Schygulla in mind. I had met her in Belgrade in 2004 and she put a spell on me. I was really into the idea of working with her. Some German journalists have compared my career to that of Fassbinder’s, but I don’t see it at all. I come from the streets, not the theater. Yilmaz Güney is more my background, independent against the norm. What Fassbinder was to Hanna, Güney was similar to actor Tuncel Kurtiz, who I also imagined early on to be part of THE EDGE OF HEAVEN. But my goal wasn’t to use them as icons from films by Fassbinder and Güney. It would have been vain of me to try and use them like no one else before. I didn’t want my direction to be affected like that. For me, my job is storytelling. And both Hanna and Tuncel fit the idea I had for the parents in the story.
SAMPLING
The challenge for me as a filmmaker is not to repeat myself. I like to surprise myself and ultimately the audience. I hope that all my films will seem different. I guess we’ll be able to judge that five films from now. When my ideas come, they all come at the same time and they come from a lot of different sources. I even recycle, like sampling in hip-hop music, which I love. They use known bass lines to create something new from something old, and it’s a sort of homage at the same time. Some of the issues in THE EDGE OF HEAVEN were sampled from CROSSING THE BRIDGE. The character of the political activist Ayten was inspired by those Kurdish singers. Here in the West, we don’t have to fight for freedom of speech. But the war for justice is still going on in Turkey.
PASSION IS SEXY
Fighting for something with passion is sexy. And I wanted a sexy character for THE EDGE OF HEAVEN. Ayten is very emotional. She’s street smart and very attractive. She’s a political person. At first, actress Nurgül Yesilçay didn’t feel comfortable with the political background of the character. When she finally agreed, she went all the way. I was fascinated by how well she knew her character. I know a lot of women like Ayten and Nurgül is not one of them. Ayten is sort of a female version of me. She believes in one thing, but later she will surprise herself and change her ideas.
AM I POLITICAL?
I want to change the world - am I political? My film hopes the world will change – is it political? Probably more philosophical, but I think everything is political in today’s world. In the times we live in, I think it’s impossible to separate life and politics and art. I believe in the stuff I believe in, but I might change my mind tomorrow. I try not to be dogmatic. Whatever people believe in – religion or politics – everything has limits, everything heads in one direction. I wanted to make a film about going to the other side of all that, going beyond all that. I tried to make this film with some distance, as a viewer from the outside. But it didn’t seem to be possible. Sometimes it’s not the head which directs. I guess it’s a part of me that’s much more irrational, like the heart.
GERMANY AND TURKEY
As Germans, Susanne and Lotte represent the European Union, while Ayten and Yeter represent Turkey. Everything that happens between them in THE EDGE OF HEAVEN is representative of the relationship of those systems. I had some fun with the argument between Susanne and Ayten regarding the European Union. But where I stand is not the point. I wrote this dialogue based on what I have often heard from real people around me. By the end of the film, German Susanne and Turkish Ayten both experience a profound change in how they see and feel about things. In the bookstore scene at the end where they hug, I noticed a small detail only in the edit. Not far from the women, there are two small flags, one German, the other Turkish. My friend and partner, Andreas Thiel, who passed away during the last week of the shoot, put them there. This stands for something. I guess it’s also a film about the relationship between the two countries.
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