A bunch of Turkish men where looking for some girl called "sully". I sent them into the exhibition where like in a car wash they where pushed from person to person asking for sully and when they after an hour decided to leave Raffaella brought them over to me.
"Sully?" The bold headed man with an earring accused me of not admitting I am that. " No I am Sunci. Suncica. Never ever Sully!" "you speak italiano?" he asked. " Si." I answered and so the rest of the conversation carried on in Italian. He was a young up and coming Turkish film director. Raffaella had told him I would be the right girl for his film. So he came to arrange an audition with me. I was bewildered but seeing it was all a big oriental adventure, of course I said I am ready to act in a movie. I had acted in plenty of plays at school after all .He arranged to email the script and told me where to meet him in Taxim the following day.
When the next day dawned, the phone battery had died and I became a bit worried about the rash promise to audition.However Caterina and the rest of the Italian mafia where convinced I would be making a tremendous mistake if I pulled out of my one in a life time chance of becoming a Turkish move star they all egged me on, and Raffaella confirmed my meeting.
We met by a hotel which looked decedent enough and as it had started raining hard I was rather disappointed that on seeing me he indicated I follow his rushing elsewhere looking for the Turkish film production house. We sped walked down steephilled streets with houses of varying heights stuck to one another in a pure disorder, walked between buildings garages shops, up and down until I pretty much lost my orientation and realised I am somewhere out of my own depths. If raffaella did, I too could trust this man, though the whole time I was very suspicious and on alert.
After half an hour, he pulled me into a portal belonging to some tall communist-style residential block, trough its dark interior and into a lift. I was feeling all the less reassured. Somewhere on the 15th floor above Istanbul he opened an apartment door an lead me in to a space decorated with white feathers, sheep skins, silver mirrors, glitter, palms, where a pretty woman with long black hair wearing silver stilettos and zebra stripes kissed both of us on the cheeks whilst a Persian cat wrapped itself around my ankles. Although it did look like a pimp den, her presence reassured me somehow.
On the balcony outside the tiny apartment sat two men around the table drinking Turkish coffee. " These are famous Turkish theatre actors" The director introduced them " The lady runs the production house " " And where is the production house I enquired" "this is the production house" " Oh" was my response. But I was rather pleased at the extent of kitch as it placed Istanbul which I had got used to in the previous days back into the genre of exotic.
The balcony towered above a chaotic haphazard mix of buildings sprawled over several hills down to the sea. The houses where personified with millions of antennas, satellite dishes, corrugated metal, ribbed plastic, clothes drying, people had free styled into the buildings with additions tailored to their own needs and in a design for which they would have beed arrested in England.
The man named Khan seated opposite me at the table had a fantastic black moustache and a big belly. He looked like a character from thousand and one nights. I asked him if he can fortune read from the coffee. No one apart from the director spoke anything but Turkish so using hands and exhaggerated expressions the actor confirmed he can read my fortune and I was made a coffee to enable him to do so. We ouued and aaaaaahd, he made hand gestures of birds, and bears ,which at the time I seemed to understand .
When Khan had gesticulated my future, it was time for my to be auditioned, and I was lead to an apartment on the floor beneath.
The film was going to be a big hit. The same director and production house had filmed many successfully films before. The plot was set in a house of an Italian old lady who was living with her niece and who had decide to host a Turkish young man during his studies. At first the Turkish man was mistrusted by the lady to eventually learn Italian with her help and of course fall in love with this Italian niece who by and by broke his heart. Bust the reason I was interested in doing the film was that it was going to be filmed in Itlay which since my departure the year before I had began to miss.
I had not managed to learn the script before hand so he gave me the computer and bade me read it out to him with no rehearsal alone. I was of course going to be the niece.After a few minutes he set to shoot my interpretation.
He opened the balcony door and sat me at the table. Right in opposite of me on a balcony sprawled on plastic lied a hairy man in his underwear watching the whole a-do. At the balcony next to him a family clanked spoons eating broth. Ship horns and neighbour TVs added their own noise to the cacophony but the director was not distracted. He took out his mobile phone- as there was no real camera in the production house at this moment and told me to say the script. I read the script. He walked about me, moving chairs filming me, a bird landed on the balcony he filmed it too, the man in underwear opposite burped, he filmed him too.When the director was content with the footage we goodbyed the rest of the production team and left the building.
The director than started saying goodbye to me, but than in the last moment offered something he apparently he has custom to do, take his actors on a tour of Istanbul. Riding the thrill of the unknown i jumped onboard. Once we emerged out of the wacky part of town and on to a main road, the director hailed down not a taxi, but a dodgy brown van . The van was full of people heading to the east side of the city, and dropped us of at the Bosporus sea crossing. We jumped on to a boat and entered the choppy drizzle sea. The director accompanied the whole journey with a speech about the history of Istanbul and a great emphases to Ataturk military hero and creator of the new republic of Turkey to whom many buildings and roads in Istanbul are dedicated. By the time we where on the Asian side of Istanbul, night had fallen. A huge queue of people where waiting in line with plastic containers in hand for the free meals given to the poor during the Ramadan. Once again with a tempo of the running bird we sped along the dark coast, into another boat and where delivered to a lighthouse in the middle of the Bosporus.
The lighthouse once was a place the emperor had made to keep his daughter virgin, where she had died from loneliness. From the lighthouse balonices one can see where Europe meets Asia over the Posphorous sea, which is rather cool, and can see most of Istanbul from it. Now days the interior of the lighthouse has been turned into a restaurant with live Turkish music and waiters wearng fez hats. We had a great dinner. I Finlay tried some Turkish food and vines as the Italians had kept me eating in the Thai restaurant all week . Painted a tiny moleskine portrait of the director as a gift and was all ready to end the night.
The director accompanied me to the centre of town where i thanked him for the eventful day and asked to be told the results of the audition. He insisted on walking me closer to my lodgings. I let him walk several hundred meters, and thanked him again, trying to get rid off him, but his politeness was rather ower bearing, and he insisted to walk me closer still to my apartment. I had on purpose stooped the taxi about a kilometer away from where I was staying, just in case, out of gut instinct which appeared to have been in the Right, for it became increasingly obvious that this bold short man who thought him self big shot director was not going ready to let some amateur actress to shed him like an old snake skin. Whilst I had on purpose been walking in circles trough streets of restaurants trying to weave some sort of web in which I could stick him, I was becoming all the more uncomfortable but did not want to show it, and than when I could no longer bear his gentile walking me to my door, i broke all codes of good manners and I did what a girl in that situation should, I legged it,using my legs which where as long as his entire height and there for could not be caough up with, sprinting all the way home. .--
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