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"The Gotham-y Look of the Movie." Filmmaker Tolga Karaçelik on Psycho Therapy

  • Writer: CBCCPodcast
    CBCCPodcast
  • 1 day ago
  • 7 min read

We chat with the filmmaker about his new indie thriller starring non-serial killer Steve Buscemi.

Psycho Therapy Tolga Karaçelik Interview

Welcome to Creator Corner, our recurring interview series in which we chat with the industry's coolest and most thought-provoking creators. In this entry, we're discussing Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About A Serial Killer with director/writer Tolga Karaçelik.

 

No one is as desperate a creature as a creative. We speak from profound self-understanding. Filmmaker Tolga Karaçelik certainly feels the same. His new film, Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer, is a viciously funny movie about the creative process and the diabolical depths a novelist will travel to make something worthy of attention. The film stars John Magaro as the writer and Steve Buscemi as the serial killer. Stuck between them is the writer's miserable wife, played by Britt Lower.

Psycho Therapy is Karaçelik's English-language debut, and as such, comes crammed with challenges for the director, especially in terms of tone management. We were eager to chat with Karaçelik about his method of balancing grimness with humor and ensuring his audience is as uncomfortable with the themes and tones as he is. As a lover of film, he was equally enthused to share what he's learned on the streets of New York City, where he was damn sure he had to shoot this film.


This conversation has been edited for length and clarity:

 

Tolga Karaçelik Juggles the Psycho Therapy Tone


Brad: I'm curious as to how you manage your tone in the script versus how you manage your tone while filming, and then how you manage that tone in the edit.


Tolga Karaçelik: You always know the tone from the beginning. Maybe sometimes you don't know the story, but you know how it should make you feel as a filmmaker. So while I'm writing, I write in that rhythm and every character has a different rhythm, and so as long as that rhythm is sincere and consistent, you can even put socks on your hands and then make them talk and then it'll become a story. So, consistency is the key thing about sincerity. I think consistency in the rhythm of the characters and the scenes, etc. are the things that I care about. So this is exactly how I pictured it while I was writing and also editing.


Brad: You've made dark comedies in the past, but I'm curious, though, now, with your first English language film, if there were challenges in the tonal management during the filming process?


Tolga Karaçelik: Yes, writing is something else, but directing in your second language is tricky because you don't know if you're being rude, sometimes, when you're talking. I never was. I call Britt [Lower] part of my family. I call Steve [Buscemi] a friend, and John [Magaro] a friend; and the crew. But sometimes an idea comes to your mind, and I'm like a five-year-old on the set. I'm an excited person, not a cool, sit-back person. I want to be there and stuff. So that might be challenging, to say in that moment, because the moment that you say things to the actors are also important and you don't want to be rude. You don't know if it's rude or not to say that thing in that way.


I had to be cautious about things that I was saying, and that brings some self-awareness, which also might be a block while you are connecting and talking about energies. Like you said, the tone management is actually controlling the energy on the set, so that self-awareness might kill the energy on the set, and that was the challenging part.


Brad: And what were the challenges and maybe even the joys of filming in New York?


Tolga Karaçelik: I'm joking, but don't shoot at Chinatown on Friday night. Don't. I did. Not recommended. I don't know why no one told me, "what are you doing over here?" But no, I always wanted to shoot it here because New York City is where I learned filmmaking. In 2003, I lived here in Orchard Street, Lower East Side, and this is where I learned filmmaking. This is where I proposed to my wife, and so I wanted to give back. With Istanbul, it's my favorite city. Istanbul is also beautiful, but New York City is... I am in love with New York City, so I had to give back to New York, and it had to be in New York. I don't want to shoot in a studio back in Bulgaria or someplace. I wanted to shoot here and thank God I was able to. I want to thank my producers for me.


Tolga Karaçelik Could Only Make Psycho Therapy in NYC


Brad: What can you not fake about New York?


Tolga Karaçelik: The grit, the look, the Gotham-y look of the movie. It's like that's why I want the movie. I wanted the movie to look like me and we wanted it to look like that Gotham that we have in our mind, that New York that we have in our minds - a little bit dark, the blacks are black, the greens are green, and the copper all torn out, greenish feeling that has dust on it, rust on it, not dust - dust also on it. That kind of feeling had to be as good as they could be. It has a different feeling to shoot on location, of course, always.


Brad: Talk to me a little bit about the conversations that you had with Natalie Kingston, your DP, in discovering the visual language of the film.


Tolga Karaçelik: We started working so early and she's like me, she's a hard worker. And I love to be really a hundred percent ready on the set, because we only had 21 days to shoot this movie, first of all. So we were all working a lot, and we were always on the same page. And we both wanted it to have this heavy, thick look, like the eerie look, kind of like a thriller-ish look, a little bit pop-ish also, at the same time, look on the film because that kind of comedy is a comedy that I want to make also.


When you least expect it, dark humor works much better than, "Yeah, it's going to be a fun film. You're going to be laughing a lot. You're going to be enjoying it. You'll be smiling after you leave it." I don't want my movies to feel like that. I want you to be a little bit shocked and a little bit out of your comfort zone while you're watching it. I'm shooting my first English debut film. I'm not in my comfort zone, so I don't expect you to be in your comfort zone. So the look definitely showed that.


Brad: One of the sequences that springs to mind, as you're talking, is the bathroom chloroform sequence and the comedy of that situation.


Tolga Karaçelik: [Laughing] I just remembered how we shot it, that's why I'm laughing.


Brad: Yeah, so tell me a little bit about filming that sequence.


Tolga Karaçelik: First of all, it's hard to find the right size toilet in New York City, like enough that you can put a crew in and small enough that it would look not so luxurious. It would look like an Albanian mobster's bathroom. So the scene, we had three shots, maybe three rolls, three shots on it, and then, yeah, it was so fun watching someone make another one just faint with his crotch, with the chloroform on his crotch. And it was fun shooting and John delivering all those screens, et cetera. I was literally laughing while I was shooting. I was so happy shooting that scene. It was so fun, seriously fun.


Tolga Karaçelik Gets Surreal with Psycho Therapy


Brad: Yeah, I mean, that is one of those scenes where, I guess, because of the type of viewer that I am, I do pull myself out just to imagine what the shooting experience must have been like, the absurdity of that. But I also know that you are a fan of absurdity. You've referenced Kafka in previous interviews, and I see him all over this movie.


Tolga Karaçelik: Yes. I think Ivy was more political than my second film. I have always had magical, realistic elements in my movies. Ivy, my second film, was taking place in a stranded bulk carrier ship that's unable to move, and ivies were growing. Thousands of snails were on the ship. So I always have this strange illness. I don't know where they come from, but I love mixing. I just shoot the films that I want to watch, to be honest with you. I'm not thinking that much. It's instinct. It's who I am.


Brad: You also take a lot of time to write your scripts. You take years to write your scripts. Why does it take so much time? How much recovery process is there after you've completed the script and completed the filming?


Tolga Karaçelik: When the film finishes, I'm so glad that it's just leaving me. I'm not like a "they're my children" type director. They can just go to hell after they are finished, because I was with them for so long, but then I start loving them again afterwards. The writing thing is, I take notes for a long time, like seven years, eight years. For example, I'm 43 years old. You can say, "how did you write and direct these four films then if it takes eight, seven years?"


But I'm taking notes, at the same time, to three or four different topics and then something stays with me and I just start to talk about that. The same thing over and over again. This is where you start losing your friends. When you're only talking about that, then you realize you have to sit down and focus on that thing because then the beginning and the end of the story that you can tell, that you're telling to your friend, which you always do. So, not to lose any more friends, you sit down and then the engineering part starts. It's just like mathematics then, actually.

 

Psycho Therapy: The Shallow Tale of a Writer Who Decided to Write About a Serial Killer is now playing in select theaters and On Demand.

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