The near-death of an actress in an accident while filming nearly ended director Kim Ki-duk’s career four years ago, but after making Pieta, which took best picture at this year’s Venice film festival, he is now South Korea’s most feted auteur.
The incident, in which an actress playing a character who hanged herself fainted with the rope around her neck and was cut down by Kim himself, shook Kim so badly it changed his views on mortality.
Hit with a subsequent wave of staff departures, he retreated from the world to live in a rough wooden shack he built himself about an hour outside of Seoul.
“For the past two to three years, I believed there was no value in my life any more and did not make any movies,” said the soft-spoken 52-year old, his hair tied back and wearing shabby chestnut-coloured Korean traditional clothes.
“I hated everything. Then I thought life was way too long,” Kim said of his self-imposed exile.
But the working-class Kim, who has been tagged by some feminist critics as “all evil, no good”, a misogynist or even a psychopath, picked himself up to make Arirang last year and then the ultra-violent Pieta.