Deniz Gamze Ergüven: ​‘Women are per­ceived through a fil­ter of sexualisation’

Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut fea­ture, Mus­tang, is a pow­er­ful cri­tique of sex­ist Turk­ish cul­tur­al prac­tices. Events are root­ed in the director’s for­ma­tive expe­ri­ences. Her fam­i­ly emi­grat­ed to Paris when she was a baby but remained ​“an island of Turkey”. The film tran­scends the bleak­ness of its sub­ject with beau­ti­ful and light-hand­ed storytelling.

LWLies: What is the source of the real sto­ries that inform many of the film’s events?

Ergüven: The lit­tle scan­dal that the girls trig­ger at the begin­ning of the film is some­thing that we lived in my gen­er­a­tion. The girls beat­en in order of their ages hap­pened in my mother’s gen­er­a­tion. In the news­pa­per, you always read about vir­gin­i­ty reports. I want­ed to know what was behind the scenes so I spoke with a gynae­col­o­gist who told me about that scene, which even­tu­al­ly end­ed up in the film as Selma’s wed­ding night – she’s tak­en to the hos­pi­tal in the mid­dle of the night by her husband’s fam­i­ly because she hasn’t bled. That was some­thing a doc­tor told me as being an occur­rence that he comes across 40, 50 times a year in the wed­ding sea­sons – spring/​summer. So three sets of real­i­ty. The one major dif­fer­ence is that the char­ac­ters tran­scend those sit­u­a­tions. If we trig­gered a scan­dal we didn’t react as the char­ac­ters. We didn’t even say anything.

What is the process of turn­ing facts into a fic­tion­alised story?

Once it starts off with char­ac­ters being hero­ic, the end­ing had to be glo­ri­ous, vic­to­ri­ous in a way, even if it’s shad­ed by the feel­ing of every­thing lost on the way. There’s so many motives of fairy tale and even mythol­o­gy. The girls for me are like a lit­tle hydra. They’re one body with five heads. The uncle is some kind of Mino­taur and he’s Daedalus. Then it con­t­a­m­i­nates aes­thet­ic choic­es. These are in no way nat­u­ral­is­tic sets. They’re cho­sen to look big­ger than life. I want­ed to make shots that could be draw­ings. The shot when you have the electrics com­ing off is like a lit­tle draw­ing. You see the con­tour of the vil­lage, you see the wind­ing roads on the side of the sea.

Where is that beau­ti­ful loca­tion where events are set?

It was on the coast of the Black Sea. We did 1,000 kilo­me­tres of loca­tion scout­ing. The check lists for the sets were so long. There was just one place that fit­ted per­fect­ly. It was in the region of Kas­ta­manu around the town of Inebolu.

Did you search equal­ly hard to find the five young actresses?

It was long months of audi­tion­ing a lot of girls. It was about who I can direct, who I can’t direct. I nev­er said, ​‘This is a bad actress. This is a good actress.’ All five of them had great lis­ten­ing, great imag­i­na­tion and the capac­i­ty to dive into scenes for long min­utes. It was about being extreme­ly play­ful, engag­ing into con­tact a lot. There were so many exer­cis­es. All those act­ing exer­cis­es and exer­cis­es you do to gen­er­ate empa­thy and games where they had to do play­ful things like chil­dren, and engage in eye con­tact, hug­ging. In a group, you set the tone. Elit [Iscan, who plays Ece], the old­est one, had a great ener­gy about get­ting the oth­ers to be in a shar­ing mood – not at all com­pet­i­tive, nobody was jump­ing for the cam­era. That nev­er hap­pened. They backed off when they knew it was the turn of some­body else.

Do you under­stand why some men see females only as sex objects?

There’s this way of want­i­ng to be right­eous which is not exact­ly in sync with human nature. There’s a fil­ter of sex­u­al­i­sa­tion through which women are per­ceived. It’s an idea that the main reli­gions car­ry, a way of say­ing that women cre­ate dis­or­der because they gen­er­ate desire. The direc­tor Cather­ine Breil­lat has a thought that I real­ly like: ​‘If we pro­ceed with the same log­ic, we should cov­er up kids from head to toe because there are pae­dophiles.’ If you start to organ­ise soci­eties to accom­mo­date peo­ple who can’t han­dle their desire, then it’s going wrong.

In Turkey, you have these fes­ti­vals where you have lunch­es, which are home cook­ing. House­wives go into those busi­ness­es. It’s their field most of the time. You often have a TV on with the Turk­ish equiv­a­lent of MTV. Near-naked women danc­ing in a very sug­ges­tive way. Those two sets of women across the room from each oth­er – the ones veiled and the ones who are danc­ing half-naked say exact­ly the same thing: ​‘I’m a sex­u­al object’. There’s noth­ing half-way. Sex is maybe three per cent of your life. It’s not 100 per cent.