I don't know exactly where Gravity began. But when I finished writing the screenplay, I realized that, at its heart, the film was asking one simple question: What if your childhood dream really came true?

Deniz enters the story at the moment she begins to feel estranged from her own body. In the girls' changing room, she senses that something no longer fits. She leaves that space and runs to Umut—the only person with whom she can still look up at the sky and imagine another reality. Their friendship exists in a world untouched by expectations, yet growing up means gradually becoming aware of the gaze of others. It means feeling observed, becoming self-conscious in the presence of your closest friend, and discovering the urge to hide.

Deniz and Umut find shelter in an abandoned pool they transform into their own secret world: beneath the earth, yet somehow closer to the sky. It becomes a place where Deniz can exist without explanation. Outside of it, she struggles to find where she belongs. She watches the boys play football from afar, yet cannot fully enter the girls' world either. Her silence, her difference, and her inability to perform what is expected of her isolate her even further.

Umut seems able to move freely between these worlds. Deniz cannot. The moment she stops waiting for him and begins trying to adapt to the world around her marks the beginning of adulthood—not because she is suddenly older, but because she starts accepting that identity comes with boundaries imposed from the outside. Growing up becomes the slow realization that some relationships, like childhood itself, cannot remain unchanged.

The title Gravity emerged from an image that stayed with me throughout the writing process. Deniz dreams of a place without gravity. Not because she longs for outer space, but because she longs to escape the weight of belonging somewhere she cannot fully recognize herself. Gravity becomes a metaphor for everything that gradually anchors us to the world: social expectations, gender roles, and the identities we learn to perform. As we grow older, we wear more masks to make ourselves legible to others, and with each one we drift a little farther from the child we once were.

The world Deniz and Umut built together slowly disappears. Their refuge fills with water. By the end of the film, Deniz's impossible dream comes true: gravity disappears. Yet what leaves with it is not only the ball floating away, but childhood itself.

For me, Gravity is less a story about growing up than about the fragile space between childhood and adolescence—a fleeting moment when imagination still resists reality, before the world quietly teaches us where we are expected to stand.