Cem Bender

I have a habit that comes from the theater. It makes me nervous to shoot the stage without being properly prepared. We turn into our own inner world before we go on stage in the theater; it is making ourselves ready for the play. It is very difficult to do something on the set, but at least you have to be prepared beforehand. Of course, we need to memorize our script, but we need to know why our character says it, before and after of that saying, what are the peak points of the scene, and so on. Then you need to give yourself time to get rid of the excess and enter the stage cleanly. To illustrate, I do not ask for last-minute intervention for costumes, hair, and makeup. I just say “Do whatever you are going to do before you record and leave me alone.” I prefer to enter the stage with a soul serenity. It also works very well to working on stage properly with my partner.

The first thing I say was this: “Do the acting for yourself and make it your priority to be happy while doing it. If you are honest on stage, if you feel good, the audience will understand it.” Acting is not done for someone else or to show it to someone. It is something that must end in one’s reckoning with oneself and end there. You embellish it with various techniques, you develop it, you take it to the next stage, but it is basically an individual action that you do for yourself. For this reason, it is a process that requires great devotion, discipline, and of course luck. It is also so cruel, it is hard to catch it again when you start to lose your job. You have to constantly keep your acting alive and feed. It is a profession that requires at least as much discipline as an engineer.

I learned to live with the two of them. When I was studying architecture, there was a theatre. Acting training is actually an education that I believe every person should take. It is the discovery of oneself, one’s body, potential, gaining the ability to empathize, and developing one’s perception. I did not start my acting training with a desire to be an actor. It is an educational process and it is a good experience. Moreover, acting helped me a lot in architecture. I learned to live with the two of them and got used to it. If I leave one, it feels like I am lame, and the two feed off each other.