Production
According to historical records, after the death of his Mongolian-born queen, Noguk, King Gongmin descended into a life of homosexual debauchery, hiring a team of handsome male bodyguards of noble birth to serve in the palace in 1372. When one of the bodyguards made King Gongmin’s second wife pregnant, Gongmin tried to kill him to quell the scandal, but was killed by the bodyguard’s friends instead. But some historians disagree with this account, insisting that Gongmin was slandered in an attempt to justify the founding of the Joseon Dynasty, and that the youths were just bodyguards.
A Frozen Flower takes its title from a song of that era which described the sexual relationships between men and women. It is the fifth feature film by director Yoo Ha, who wanted to make a change from his previous works by doing a historical film, saying, "I always felt uncomfortable with the genre but I felt I should try to overcome those feelings. It is also a new challenge for me to focus on a melodrama." He also stated that the film was "a love story between men."
Jo In-sung was on board from the beginning of the project, and turned down other acting roles to make A Frozen Flower his last work before enlisting for military service. He chose to appear in the film without knowing the exact details, having faith in the director following their earlier collaboration in 2005 on A Dirty Carnival. Jo began training for the role in August 2007, learning martial arts, fencing, horse riding and geomungo. The casting of Joo Jin-mo as the king was announced in December 2007.
The budget for A Frozen Flower was $10 million, and the film went into production on 16 April 2008. It was the first film to shoot at the newly built Jeonju Cinema Studio.
Read more about this topic: Frozen Flower
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“... this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth.”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)