You chose to go with your team to some villages near Sofia. Did you find any interesting places?

We
toured several villages across the gorge of the Iskar River. I think
the most interesting place we found was an old, completely deserted
railway station. There were no people and the small building was full of
remnants of past life. Among the waste, bird nests and broken things, I
found a very old writing desk. It was astonishing that on the inner
side of one of its doors were posted portraits of the communist leaders –
Todor Zhivkov, Lenin, Brezhnev, Stalin, Khrushchev. I thought about all
these portraits and the missing image  – of the man who had collected
them.

In this context, how do you look for actors you work with? Have you got any ideas for individuals and their typology in advance?

Yes,
I imagine certain types and I always have stared at the people’s faces.
But when I prepare a film I try not to fix characters and then to look
for actors. The only character in the film, for which I wanted to find a
specific type of face, was the role of the murderer. More than a month I
worked only on the selection of actors, unusually long for a standard
film production. The pictures had to happen in winter, and this is a
difficult period for casting, as most actors are busy shooting for
serials. Generally, for me the shooting period is a special time
 
Tell us more about the period of filming of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

The
filming lasted 11 weeks, I realized that the filming period for all my
feature films is the same – 11 weeks. I know this is not a typical
shooting time – it’s too long. We have to wait for certain conditions of
the weather, sky  and daylight for days. In Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
I needed a dark, cloudy weather with wind, with rain, including
overnight. Fortunately, in this production, we were much better prepared
and managed to cope well with the vagaries of the weather. I realize
with pleasure, that me and my team become more and more prepared: we
refined the dialogue, the whole text and the details of the script in
advance. And  besides I had at my disposal much larger team – about 70
people.

Read the whole interview with Nuri Bilge Ceylan on SIFF's website.