By Keiron Henderson

SEOUL (Reuters Life!) - Daniel Gordon has persuaded North Korea to allow him unprecedented freedom to make three films and now he wants a shot at the big one: a movie about the reclusive communist country's leader Kim Jong-il.

Gordon, in Seoul on a whirlwind tour to promote his latest film "Crossing the Line" about U.S. defector James Dresnok, laughs and cites U.S. boxing promoter Don King when he talks about his hopes of making a film on North Korea's "Dear Leader".

"The guy at the very top would be the ultimate story. What did Don King use to say? 'There are two chances Slim and None, and Slim just left town'," Gordon told Reuters recently at the bar of the Seoul Foreign Correspondents' Club.

Kim Jong-il, who succeeded Kim Il-sung in the world's first communist handover of power from father to son in 1994, has been playing cat-and-mouse with his neighbours and the United States for years over North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Kim Jong-il has been called North Korea's biggest movie buff, with a video library said to hold thousands of films and credits as director and producer of communist propaganda movies at home.

The secretive autocracy was bundled by U.S. President George W. Bush with Iran and pre-war Iraq in an "Axis of Evil".

"I really want to make a big film about North Korea, I need one that has that cinematic feel that the other three haven't. There are smaller stories that I know would be nice to do but would kind of be TV docs," Gordon said.

Critics say his films -- about the shock success of the North Korean football team in the 1966 World Cup, and about two girl gymnasts preparing for the unique Arirang Mass Games events, have been soft targets. They say the films gloss over a society dogged by reports of repression and human rights abuses.

The United States and rights groups accuse the North's government of having a network of political prisons, using guilt by association and public execution to intimidate the population.

CRITICISM

Gordon, who is 34 and made his first North Korean film because of his passion for football, says he and film-making partner Nick Bonner are intensely aware of the criticism.

"Anything you do with North Korea has got to be tinged by everything else that's written about North Korea. The way I look at it there are many sides to every single country and society and all we're showing is a glimpse of ordinary life in Pyongyang. We make that distinction," he said.

"To my mind there's more to North Korea than just the human rights issues, just the starvation. We're acutely aware of those issues and all the political games that have been played. To me the way of dealing with it is always about engagement, always about talking to people."

Gordon has deliberately adopted a low-key approach in his North Korean films, allowing his subjects to tell their stories in their own words, content to picture everyday routines and backgrounds -- just the stuff that a world hungry for details of life in country laps up.

The latest film has extensive interview footage with Dresnok, a U.S. soldier who crossed into North Korea in 1962 just as U.S. and communist armies faced each other at one of the Cold War's hottest potential flashpoints.

The film maker in all his Korean films lets the camera linger on the North Korean panorama. A view of Pyongyang's cavernous marbled subway; a rural celebration; an excursion to Mount Paektu sacred to Koreans; shots in a school yard -- unheard of liberty for a Western film maker.

The country has had a big impact on Gordon, who first visited in 2001 and reckons he spent 10 months there over many trips.

"It's almost like you go to North Korea and they inject you with a little drug and you have to keep going back," he said.

"It's a country like no other. It's sometimes very easy for me to be a little bit blase about the access we have, but when you take a step back and think we are the only people in the world allowed this access we should be making more films."

(Additional reporting by Jon Herskovitz)