kim ki-duk i cinemateket: q&a

click here for danish version

In connection with Cinematekets Kim Ki-duk series, Kim Ki-duk introduced his award-winning Samaritan Girl (2004) in the evening on a cold autumn day. After the screening, the audience had the opportunity to ask the director some questions. Lars from Eiga was on the spot and got some exciting details from the Q&A-session, among other things Kim Ki-duk’s future movie plans after The Bow (Hwal, 2005).

Kim Ki-duk on Samaritan Girl:

- “Samaritan Girl” is about how we perceive each other. That’s why the movie is split in three segments. The first part is about how the two girlfriends perceive each other. Part two is about how children perceive their parents, and third part is about how parents perceive their children.

- The ending of the movie isn’t the ending of the girl's story. The movie only shows a tiny bit of her life. Her story continues but it’s you who decide what further happens to her. I leave it to the individual to decide how the movie ends. My own interpretation is only the opinion of a single person. Yours can be just as true.

According to Kim Ki-duk, it only took 11 days to shoot Samaritan Girl. The film's budget was $400.000.

Kim Ki-duk on his own role in Korean film:

- In Asia you go to the movies because of the famous names. But people in Europe don't know the actors, so here you watch the movies for what they are.

- As people in Korea watch more art-movies and European movies, I think they’ll adapt accordingly to my movies.

- Because people in Europe watch my movies I can get funding to keep on creating them.

Kim Ki-duk on religion:

- I’m not a believer but one day I hope I’ll come to believe in everything!

- After Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... And Spring (2003) many believed that I was a Buddhist, but in fact I’ve never been one. It's probably because Buddhism plays such a huge part in Korean culture, like Christianity is a big part of European culture. So even though I’m not a Buddhist, it could easily have had an influence on the movie.

Kim Ki-duk on his next movie:

- All of my movies are based on a specific idea. “Spring, Summer...” describes a cycle of life while Samaritan Girl is about how we perceive each other. Right now I have five ideas, I’m working on.

- I think my next movie will be about a gun. I want to follow the gun; from when it is made till the day it’s being used to kill a person. I’ll try to show how the gun perceives it and how this event affects it. The movie could just as easily follow a missile or a bomb. It’s about describing the weapons industry and what kind of consequences it has.

Kim Ki-duk also revealed that he’d been in Denmark once before. It was 15 years ago when he was travelling through Scandinavia and visited Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki:

- At that time I hadn’t dreamed that one day I’d stand in Copenhagen again as a movie director.

(page 1: danish version)