For the past two decades, South Korean maverick filmmaker Kim Ki-duk's low-budget movies have given him international acclaim, highly coveted awards and many controversies.
Now, one of the most accomplished and critically acclaimed Asian directors is turning to China to make his first multimillion-dollar film.
Kim recently signed a USD 24 million deal with a Chinese production company to make an epic war movie with Buddhism as a central theme, with another USD 6 million set aside for marketing.
"This movie is not just targeting the Chinese market. The subject will interest the US and Europe as well," Kim said in an interview. "I want to talk about how politics manipulates religion."
Although religion inspired many of his previous works, the new project will be an outlier in Kim's career.
The budget for the movie, written by Kim and tentatively titled "Who Is God" in English, is nearly three times bigger than the sum of the budgets for all of his 21 other films. It will be his first time working with a full Chinese cast in a Chinese language movie.
The staggering growth of the Chinese movie industry has been irresistible to many South Korean movie directors. But Kim, who visited the Busan International Film Festival with his latest work, "Stop," said it was not the commercial success that attracted him to China.
It was the film set and the filmmaking system in China that appealed to him at a time when he felt worn out and alienated from the South Korean movie industry.
"I'm too exhausted. It was so hard to make 'Stop' alone," the veteran moviemaker said. "Now I just want to sit on a (director's) chair and look at the monitor."
When he saw the Chinese film set, with each director sitting before a modern 60-inch monitor, he thought: "This could perhaps let me make the most of my ability."
"Stop," the story of a young Japanese couple conflicted about a pregnancy after moving to Tokyo from an area near the disaster-struck Fukushima nuclear plant, was filmed entirely by Kim, with no cinematographer, no art director and no lighting technician.
He made props in the morning and filmed in the afternoon, while the actors served as their own costume designer and offered their homes for the film set. Costing less than USD 10,000, it was filmed in 10 days.
"Stop" may not stand out for the profound insight into human nature that made Kim a top film director. Some critics called the work "amateurish" and "sloppy.
