Turks Quotes

(On "40 Days of Musa Dagh," a book about the Armenian genocide that he has wanted to direct for years) The hero, the one who set up the rescue, has fallen asleep . . . The camera pulls back, and the ships and the sea are on one side, and there`s one lonely figure at the top of the mountain, and the Turks are coming up the mountain by the thousands on the far side . . . an epic about the complete destruction of a civilization. The Turks have been killing that subject for 85 years.

As a director, my goal is to be completely open. Just look at how I portray sex in my films. They`re considered shocking and obscene because I like to carefully examine human sexuality. It has to be realistic. I really like documentaries, therefore, reality is important to me when I do fiction. It is often related to my own life, my Dutch background. The art scene in Holland has always attempted to be realistic. The Dutch painters of 400 years ago were meticulously realistic. The example I always like to use is a marvelous painting by Hieronymus Bosch titled "The Prodigal Son". It is a painting of a brothel, and in the corner is a man pissing against a wall. You would never, never find something like that in an Italian, French or English painting of that epoch. The Dutch have always been more scientific, interested in detail; certainly less idealistic and more realistic. The sex scenes in Vierde man, De (1983) ("The Fourth Man") and Turks fruit (1973) {"Turkish Delight"] were based on real experiences I had or a friend had. It`s very personal. Of course, I must admit that I love to shock audiences.

OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks.

Well, on the one hand the Turks have the legitimate need to defend their national dignity - and this includes being recognized as a part of the west and Europe.

And they said if we help with the crisis, they would do a lot of positive acts. After we helped in those crises, they showed negative acts and the Japanese and Turks were ashamed.

The Iraqis are not threatened by the Turks or by the Iranians or by the Saudis and they tell me that these are not weapons of mass destruction, they are weapons of self-destruction.

The terrorists who committed the 2003 Istanbul attacks were locals, that is, Turks. And when filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in the Netherlands last year, the murderer and his supporters were also part of the Muslim community.