Estranged South Korean helmer discusses project while at Busan Festival
By Youkyung Lee
BUSAN, South Korea (AP) --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 $24 million deal with a Chinese production company to make an epic war movie with Buddhism as a central theme, with another $6 million set aside for marketing.
"This movie is not just targeting the Chinese market. The subject will interest the U.S. and Europe as well," Kim said in an interview at the Busan International Film Festival. "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 Busan 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 $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."
But the anti-nuclear energy movie will stand as evidence of Kim's attempt to find an alternative movie-making venue outside of the South Korean system, where the top three film distributors control nearly three quarters of the movie theaters. Without support from one of them, a Korean movie stands no chance of succeeding at the box office.
"To be popular in South Korea, one has to have three (elements): major investment, major distribution and a well-known actor," Kim said. "I have come too far away from those things."
Kim embarked on the solitary making of "Stop" after his previous work, "One on One," fell flat at the South Korean box office in 2014, selling just 10,000 tickets. When Kim and actors from the murder thriller went to cinemas to meet audiences, they had to greet largely empty theaters. The spectacular failure happened only two years after Kim received big welcomes at home after he won the Venice Film Festival's top prize with "Pieta," a brutal story of revenge and redemption.
Feeling "so sorry" to staff and actors, he soul-searched to figure out why South Korean moviegoers had shunned his film. "Stop" was his ground zero, a do-over.
"It was ruthless training," he said.
Kim may be weaning himself off the country that never seemed to have loved him. Growing up, he received little schooling beyond primary education, spending his teenage years toiling at factories, while envying kids in school uniforms.
Although he became an internationally acclaimed director — his earlier works "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring" and "Three Iron" still inspire young filmmakers around the world — at home he hasn't enjoyed the popularity or reverence reserved for peers such as Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho.
Many Koreans, especially females, say Kim's works are too difficult to watch because of their brutality and grisly details of violence, rape and castration. Kim said that top Korean movie stars and K-pop stars are reluctant to join his projects.
Kim, the willful outsider, said he wants to stop telling stories as a Korean and wants to deal with issues concerning humanity.
"Removing prejudices between people and class," he said. "I think that's the cinema's goal."
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More