I think the thing is with a movie that has this much science fiction in it; you need characters who are more science fact, if you know what I mean, than they are human.
When I wrote my fictional novels, they always had a starting point of something real. Those images that are not real are exactly the same strength and power of the real ones, and the line between them is completely blurred.
I had the feeling that focusing on objects and telling a story through them would make my protagonists different from those in Western novels - more real, more quintessentially of Istanbul.
The idea that people in novels should be more sympathetic than people in life simply baffles me.
I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.
'The Wire' really drew on a lot of real-life situations and real-life organizations - it created fiction to make a social statement about reality.
Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.
Real people are never central characters in my works.
One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.
I've always loved books by the Bronte sisters. I love Jane Austen, too. I'm more influenced by people like her than by pop culture.
Chekhov - shall I be blunt? - is the greatest short story writer who ever lived.
Science-fiction cities in general, I think, are so hard to get right, because it's so easy to just play some cheesy music or do something that takes you right out of it, but 'Blade Runner' got it right, and I love that about the film.
