Master from Orient KIM KI-DUK
Korean director Kim Ki-duk has been making some of the most consistently interesting and controversial films to come out of the South Korean cinema scene in quite some time. With an incredible range running from poetic and near dialog less The Bow and 3-Iron to the unflinchingly violent Coast Guard and The Isle, Kim Ki-Duk has shown that great film makers can't be neatly bundled into a single genre or style. His take on relationships, love, hate, and theology may not always gel with your own but there's no denying how powerful some of his films are, and as his filmography grows, so too do his directorial skills.
Your films deal with very extreme emotions, where does the inspiration for making films that deal with this material come from?
Kim Ki-Duk: I believe that every person has multiple feelings. A person's current personality of love, hatred, jealousy, rage or a murderous intent and so on is formed upon genetic elements, education, the environment and a family a person grows in. The source of my movie comes from a theory "The white color and the black color is the same." I try not to interpret things of the world into a single meaning. Rather, I try the opposite. For example, a man, who fights too often and too well, does so, not because he's good at it but because he is scared.
Why is it that your characters are so often so quiet?
Kim Ki-Duk: I don't think that the spoken words solve everything. Sometimes silence delivers truer feelings while the words can distort the meaning in some situations.
Why the decision to have a more ambiguous ending than a more concrete one?
Kim Ki-Duk: A director should not define everything. For me, the movie is a form of a question I pose to the others or to the audience. I want to ask their opinion on my point of view and discuss it with them. That is why the movie is so interesting medium. And that is also why that my movies have no concrete answer, but the answers in progress that change constantly.
Do you find that your background in art has helped you as a film-maker?
Kim Ki-Duk: It helped me a lot. I have drawn paintings, but I also taken pictures for a long time. And I have worked for many parts in factories, so I know how machines function. And that helped me a lot, too. It is important to study the movies theoretically and technically, but the most important thing is, I think, to experience the various types of life in the world.
Which of your films do you feel the most proud of and why is it that you choose that one?
Kim Ki-Duk: There's none I feel proud of. The movies I will make in the future are the ones I take pride in, because they will contain the consciousness that I am not aware of yet. I am curious - with what kind of idea and thought I will live. But if you insist to pick one, I'd like to recommend "Address Unknown" to the American viewers. I want American youngsters to see how a youth in a third world lives.
Does God exist in your films and what part does he play?
Kim Ki-Duk: God to me is the nature the nature we see through our eyes and the nature we feel in our hearts.
The nature is the most grandeur and profound math, science, philosophy and theology.
SOURCE: INTERNET