“In 1984 I made a movie, MEMED MY HAWK, based on Nobel Prize nominee Turkish writer, Yasar Kemal, starring Sir Peter Ustinov, Herbert Lom, Leonie Mellinger, and a young English actor, Simon Dutton. The film had a Royal Première in London, in aid of UNICEF, attended by HRH the Princess Michael of Kent. The music for that film was composed by Manos Hadjidakis, and these are my recollections of it.
MEMED tells the story of star-crossed young lovers in 1930s Turkey: when a feudal Anatolian landlord wants Hatche, the young and beautiful childhood sweetheart of Memed, for his own son, the young lovers elope. Memed starts waging war against feudal landlords, and becomes a legendary brigand.
Given that the young girl, Hatche, chose her childhood sweetheart who is poor, over the feudal landlord’s son who is rich, the novel and by extention Peter Ustinov’s screenplay were deemed to be communist propaganda by the Turkish government of the day.
We were thus denied permission to shoot in Turkey, and at the last moment I had to move the production to (then) Yugoslavia.
Be that as it may, a “Young Turk” in London in the spring of 1983, I was happy as a lark. Not only had I finally got MEMED in the can, but also the “Director’s Cut”, the final stages of editing, was almost completed. Now, all we had to do was add music to the movie, and we would have a completed product in our hands. But who was going to write the soundtrack?
When I was a boy, in the early 1960s, I was smitten by an international hit, “Never on Sunday”, frequently played on the single radio station we had in Istanbul. However, I was not the only person to have fallen in love with that song, for its composer had received the Academy Award for “best original song”.”    Â
