INTERVIEW / White as Snow / Özlem Apaydın

Zete, Weekly Culture and Arts Notebook, May 2011

What aspects of Sabahattin Ali’s story “Ayran” caught your interest and made you want to turn it into a feature film?

I had read Ayran years ago. Its feeling affected me deeply. The thought ‘this story would make a fine film’ had also settled in a corner of my mind. Necati Güngör called Ayran ‘a story that pierces your heart like a bullet’. It affected me to that degree too. In most of Sabahattin Ali’s works, the sense of reality and the visual quality have always moved his readers. When I was about to start working on my feature film, one of the first stories that came to mind was ‘Ayran’. The impact of this dramatic story resulted in ‘White as Snow’. I describe White as Snow as a film like ‘a heart-wrenching fairy tale in the whiteness of the snow’. Because that was the sentence that best described our film. And I think that is what affected me in the story too…

While reading the work, I had imagined a child walking alone on a deserted, snowy road with a jug in his hand as a striking image. A child moving like a small speck within a wide-angle view of snowy, harsh nature. It was tremendous for conveying the feeling of loneliness… And when I thought about what Hasan thought and did while waiting to sell ayran, I sensed that this story would make a poetic film. Many such things kept turning over in my head while I was reading that short story and then turning it into a screenplay…

Are there characters in the screenplay who are not in the story? In what situations, and on what basis, did you add these characters?

One of the main characters, Hasan’s father, does not exist in the story. The story was written in 1938. The events take place along a railway line. I moved the story to the roadside, to the Eastern Black Sea and to the period of my own childhood. And I added the character of the father. At the beginning of the film, the father is taken to prison as a political offender. In parallel with what Hasan goes through, we watch that same day of the father’s in prison…

How did you find Hakan Korkmaz? How did the process of casting this role go – was it difficult?

Hakan is a boy who lives in the village of Demirciler in Borçka, my own hometown. He is my neighbour’s son. My cousin who lives in Borçka had sent me photos of several children, Hakan among them. When I went to Artvin for location scouting and stopped at my own village to stay for a while, I saw Hakan. The moment I saw him, I said, “There’s Hasan.”

What are the things you particularly want to emphasise in your story, in your film?

The film is the story of one day in a child’s life… In this one-day story there is hope, there is courage and there is love… White as Snow is a film like a fairy tale in which daydreams, memories and dreams mingle with reality… In this film, which speaks to these feelings, what I tried to emphasise is the ‘hope’ in John Lennon’s words, “where there is life, there is hope”…

Nature is also very much in the foreground in the film. What do you think your professional photography has contributed to your eye as a filmmaker?

A photographer’s eye is both an advantage and a disadvantage for cinema. If you think of what you are going to tell in photographic terms, you drift away from cinema. That is, you should not think of it as a single image. When I began writing the screenplay, I studied my lessons like a student for about three years, read books and did research. I knew that one of the things I had to pay most attention to was deciding what the images would be like. A photographic image may be very good as an image. But if it loses its meaning in the moving image, that is a disadvantage. A knife-edge situation, you see. I took great care to use the advantage. What is the scene telling, where should the camera stand, what should the shot size be, what should the perspective be, which lens suits that perspective, and what will my framing be? And the result: did I get what I wanted in this shot? So I decided on the images by paying attention to these questions, working backwards from the end. In making the final decision, I think my background in photography contributed to my film. When I watch the film now, I see that this is so.

Where was the film shot? How long did filming take? Could you share one or two interesting memories from the set?

The film was shot in the township of Meydancık in Artvin’s Şavşat district and in the villages of Maden, Pınarlı and Elmalı. Filming lasted 40 days in total.

Snow and cold were the hardest part of the shoot. We had a trouble-free and enjoyable atmosphere on set. In one scene, Sinem İslamoğlu, who plays the mother, had to throw an apple at a dog and instead hit a wooden post about 30 cm away from her – a throw as clumsy as could be; assistant director Özkan Çelik, on the other hand, landed a snowball right on the lens of the camera that was recording behind-the-scenes footage and filming him at that very moment – a throw just as masterful. Both were among the memories that made the crew laugh. Another interesting memory comes from Maden village… In Maden village, set materials and equipment could only be carried on sledges pulled by oxen. When the film’s producer Nur Güneş asked the crew waiting at the entrance to the village what they were waiting for, and one of them said they were waiting for the ox to do the carrying, her reply, “Does the ox know about it?”, remained one of the most enjoyable memories.

You have won great acclaim with your first feature. What are your plans now?

We received very positive feedback from festivals and from the audiences who saw the film there. We also won awards. Now I would like our film to reach a large audience both in Turkey and around the world. Our wish is that viewers will love our film and pass it on to more people by word of mouth.

I have a project related to photography. At the same time, work on my second film has begun. The synopsis and treatment are more or less done. We are starting work on the screenplay. It will be a film set in İstanbul. We are also running around for a co-production. So once again a challenging but enjoyable second process has begun.

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