Three Monkeys: Director’s Note
Cannes Film Fest 2008–Three Monkeys world premiered in competition at the Festival de Cannes. Zeitgeist will release the film, which was initially picked up by New Yorker, in April 2009.
“Since the beginning of my early youth, what has most intrigued, perplexed and at the same time scared me, has been the realization of that unprecedented wide scope of what goes on in the human psyche. It has always astonished me to see in the human soul the coexistence of the power to rule and the potential to forgive, the interest in the most holy and that of the lowest banality, and love and hate. For this reason, dealing with the qualities of our inner world, which cannot be formulated rationally, and trying to comprehend it, has always been the foremost reason for me in making films.
Three Monkeys aims to present that kind of emotional and psychological situation together with a plot loaded with the violence of complicated events evolving between four main characters. We have tried to dramatize the abstract thoughts, beliefs and conceptual conflicts that deeply engage our minds by personifying them in these characters. What intrigues us the most here is the deviation that messes up the whole, the ancillary road that separates from the main road. For example, that moment when a very brave person suddenly gets weak in the knees with fear or that moment when a coward suddenly turns brave. It is the endeavor to try to understand human nature and ourselves, and depict that through these types of deviations.”
Director and Co-Writer Nuri Bilge Ceylan
