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.