Actress Crystal Liu Yi-Fei (The Four film saga, The Forbidden Kingdom) is reportedly in extensive talks to star in Kim Ki-Duk’s latest, Who Is God, which is currently set to start rolling cameras on in less than a few months. Should she sign the dotted line, she could very well get the gig…that is, if the stalemate between South Korea and China finally wanes.
“Kim Ki-duk has been only granted a tourist visa for one month, while we applied for a work visa for three months,” producer Julia Zhang told Variety by email. “We haven’t been given any official explanation for this yet. We suspect that this has to do with the situation faced by many Korean artists who work with China at this moment. If this situation won’t change within short term, this means indeed that Mr. Kim won’t able to work as director of ‘Who Is God’.”
The report at Variety does otherwise say that Kim and Zhang are talking to partners in Hollywood and are looking to alternative measures of directing the film on top of serving as its scriptwriter, which means, essentially, that Kim would possibly helm the film from South Korea with a Chinese director on-set to relay the artistic direction. Provided, of course, that South Korea and China end their standoff over the former’s installation of a U.S.-made missile system and the latter remove their embargo on entertainment prospects between the two nations, Kim may well see to his film set by October as planned.