Mustang almost never saw the day, three weeks of shooting, my producer told me she was letting me go. It was like a scene of rupture. I thought of Stanley Kubrik's daughter Shining , when the girl begs the psychopath not to kill the child. I begged the producer. I had just learned that I was pregnant.

I contacted all the producers I knew. This time it was over. I took the boat to my mother's house. I needed little dishes, to cry all my drunk. But I did not have time to start crying. As I got off the boat, I had calls from Charles Gillibert, the first producer to whom I had sent my script, who wanted to take the film back. Back in Istanbul, no more question of going to depress in my mother.

This period reminds me of Dustin Hoffman in Macadam Cowboy , the energy deployed to survive in chaos. No more drugs. When Charles arrived, the pillar of production began to collapse. The chief operator left, the chef deco followed, and we stopped being dropped by a lot of people. A week before the shooting, we still had no costume designer. We went to the markets to buy clothes. There was something of a broken hope in me. I had already experienced this with my previous aborted film, Kings .

At three days of filming, we had passed through everything. Except that my marriage was falling right in the middle of the shoot. A director who is absent two days in this context is senseless. But everyone had taken his tickets for months. We were seven hundred kilometers from Istanbul, we borrowed one of the cars from the shooting. I was with Susanne Mareau, the coach of the actresses, one of my best friends. We arrived at 4am in Istanbul. At 6:50, seven minutes before departure, I stood in front of the boat that was supposed to take us to a small island on the Bosphorus. I'm in jeans, but I have a nice bun ... I beg you to delay the boat. I got married on Saturday, on Sunday I left.

After that, it was the race against the clock. Finish the editing before Gary is born. The post-production was punctuated by "areu", diaper changes and meetings with a baby within. What happens today, the Caesars, the Oscars, I had not dreamed of, but it is not delirious. It may sound arrogant to say that, but it is not so inconsistent.

In competition at Cannes in 2015, Mustang also received 4 Césars (Best Editing, Best Original Screenplay, Best First Work, Best Music).