We Put the World to Sleep

This is the second entry in a trilogy made together with my wife and creative partner, actress and writer Duru Yücel. All three movies are very different in style and substance, yet forming a cohesive universe. Be My Cat was anchored in the lower self (irrational instincts and impulses, the subconscious), We Put the World to Sleep is anchored in the middle self (the conscious rational mind), and Pure will be anchored in the higher self (mysteries beyond reason, the supraconscious).

Duru Yücel and I met in 2015 in a film festival as a result of my first movie Be My Cat: A Film for Anne, and around that time we began developing We Put the World to Sleep. We shot it over a period of 9 years in 13 cities, villages and remote locations across Romania, Turkey and Ukraine, using a diverse international cast (Black American, Latin American, East European, Turkish). It’s the most ambitious, difficult and disturbing project we ever did, facing numerous challenges over the years due to the extensive periods of living in character, the improvisational nature and the very long editing process to bring the 150 hours of footage down to 1h 23min.

A main goal was to combine the metaphysics of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the realism of The Blair Witch Project, two of the movies that impressed and influenced me the most as a filmmaker. Yet my first inspiration for the movie came in 2015 when I watched a documentary about serial killer Anatoly Onoprienko. While on a killing spree, Onoprienko also killed a little baby after killing the parents. When asked by authorities why he did it, he said he didn’t want the child to grow up without parents, suffering and being abused in orphanages the way it happened to him. This explanation inspired the movie’s concept: ending the world not to cause pain, but to save humans and animals from future suffering.

The script mostly consisted of plot points which evolved and changed over the 9 years of production. While creating and maintaining an alternative psychological reality for our characters, we shot countless hours of footage improvising guerrilla style, then put together the details of the story in post-production while editing.

The most frustrating moments during production happened when the improvisation either went in a direction where we no longer felt the need to record while in character, or went in directions which weren't doable due to budget limitations. Those directions were truthful to the story and character development, yet impossible to apply in practice, therefore we had to break character for weeks, put the entire production on hold and find new directions to move forward. The pandemic and being scammed by a producer also delayed the production.