You were born in 1978 in Istanbul and you grew up there. Now, if we go back to your childhood and watch little Cemre in 80’s... What would we see?

Watch? You mean spy? Bak Magazine shocked me in the first question! If you watch me secretly like a psycho in the 80s, you can see a brat who on the one hand listens to Iron Maiden and on the other tries to draw sketches with the drawing program that his brother wrote (and with Sinclair and Commodore 64) in the company of a joystick.

The boy who plays Kick Off and Sensible Soccer all the time kicking around when he loses accidentally… Well, I try to fix the gamepads that I break while playing Fifa now. So, not much has changed.

In those years, my elder brother and I spent 22 hours per day in front of the computer. My second brother and my father were champion wrestlers, they did not have a lot to do with the computer. In fact, back then people could not understand what we did anyway because they could not tell a computer from a cash register. I mean think about it, people who spend 22 hours with a cash register in their rooms, and weird music accompanying it. Slayer, Antrax… Interesting!

I don’t know how but in that atmosphere we wrote games on Amiga 500 with my brother. Combat games, platform games but none of them were completely finished. Also in the weekends I used to go to the Çarşaf caricature school in the newspaper, Hürriyet. My mother took me there for the first two years because I was about 7-8 when I started. I used that drawing techniques in the computer and in time I started to produce cartoons with the Deluxepaint program. Animations that took 50-100kb and 100-200 frame per each… Then my animations started to accumulate in the floppy disks. I did so many animations, when I think about it now I say I was probably an asocial kid. Go out, play, beat your friends. Well, I performed the beating part every once in a while! I mean computers fill you with stress. Sometimes I fought like hell with my classmates! If I take it from the 80s, a script like "Napoleon Dynamite" can emerge so I want to cut it short.

When did you start working on animation?

My elder brother bought ram for the Amiga 500. I think it was then, like 1988... Before that I could not open more than 2 frames in Deluxepaint. With the help of ram I could do animations with 100-200 frames.

Compare 80’s and 90’s... Which ten years would you prefer for the next ten?

Like the end of the 90s. Mimar Sinan years… I guess the more time passes, the more one misses his school years. Interesting. But if you ask me if I want to go back, I say God forbid!

You graduated from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts Academy. What do you think about the education given there and in Turkey? Can art be taught in a school?

Of course it can be taught. Anyone can be an artist, I always say it. Anyone can be artists, but not successful or genius artists. Just pick some guy from the street, put a nude woman in front of him, ask him to draw it, ask him a hundred times... A pretty good drawing will come out in the 100th one. But the thing is to feel as excited as you are drawing the first one, when you are drawing the last. But I do not know what the first 3-5 drawings will look like. That depends on the man and the nude woman.

People have liked the cartoons in your personal project Fistik.com very much. Especially the character, Karate Kamil... How did you create him?

I was working in Artnet Animations at that time. I had a friend named Haluk, crazy about Japanese cartoons. He read Japanese animés, fought with his friends with wooden swords, and he looked a little Japanese too. One day, when he was listening to music, I was curious and put the headphones on. You know the songs performed by shrill sounded Japanese women at the end of Japanese cartoons, you know you look for the remote to change the channel. He was listening to one of those songs!

At that moment, Karate Kamil appeared in my head. Now that it could not be Karate Haluk, it turned out as Karate Kamil. The Turk is such a character that it feels funny every time you put him in something other than being a Turk. So, I took advantage of that like many caricaturists have done. I cannot lay my hands on Karate Kamil for three years now, but there will be a time when this character resurrects. I don’t know when, though.

We know that David Fincher had worked as your assistant in Karate Kamil 4 :) Who do you think is the most talented film director in your opinion?

David Fincher is very good. I had the chance to meet him in the movie, Zodiac Killer(!) I put his name on Karate Kamil just for fun. I did not think that I would ever work with him when I did that but Blur took the animated storyboard job for the film. They gave me a few character modeling jobs from that movie. So, I had the chance to work with David Fincher. Except for him, I follow Brad Bird, Telly Gilliam, Tim Burton, Miyazagi and Jim Jarmusch.

After school, you went to the United States and started working for FDG Film Studios. Then you were at Check Six and 3Dme for 10 months. Finally you entered Blur Studios and you’re still working there since November 2002. This is a rapid and great improvement. Would you please tell us how your United States experience had begun?

My elder brother went to the U.S three years before I did, I went to saty with him and look for a job. I sent my demoreel around, then FDG film studio in Manhattan sponsored my visa and so I started. I don’t even like New York. It is good to pass it over on a plane but it is disturbing to live there. Then Check Six Studio in Los Angeles saw my work and I went there. You fall into a nightmare in LA if you don’t have a car and a driver’s license. But once you settle that, it is a beautiful city. I worked on Playstation 2 games in Check Six, but the game sector did not do it for me. There are too many constraints on Realtime 3D. And the end result even in the best game is not as good as it is in the movies.

I reprepared my demo and gave it to Blur. It was just 3-5 blocks away, I walked there, dropped the tape, they got back to me the following day and I started working there in 2 weeks. I have been working here for three years now.

In Blur, you worked on Spider Man character for Activision, animated characters for Playdoh and made animations for Sponge Bob. In all these big works, which one have you liked most?

The best of them was Spider Man. It was a pleasant project.

You are now 28 and you’re working for one of the greatest animation studios in United States. What are you expecting from the future? What’s your greatest goal?

To upgrade my level and work in better movies. But I want to create my own team and work on my own movies after I reach a particular saturation point.

Theme of our second issue is "white". What does this word mean to you?

When you say white, other than the showman who does the same jokes for 10 years now and still can be funny, a white page comes to my mind. A white page is a good thing; you have the excitement of beginning a brand new drawing. Another new, white page every time you don’t like what you drew in the previous one. It is something exciting, something good, but not as charismatic as black…

It is good to draw on black with white as well. Then, you draw the light. But drawing with black on white is basically drawing the shadows.