Chapter 182: Workshop (2)
Chapter 182: Workshop (2)
The script-reading venue had been prepared with more immersion than expected.
At the very center of the living room stood a massive square wooden table, and on top of it, paper name stands bearing the actors’ names had been arranged in neat rows.
“......”
The actors who had come in first looked frightened.
The ease with which they had been chatting and laughing outside just moments ago had completely vanished.
“...They said it was a workshop, so I came in lightly.”
“...This doesn’t feel light at all.”
As the actors watched each other and took their seats, Quentin called out impatiently.
“All right, now that everyone’s planted their asses, let’s start right away.”
That warm round of self-introductions I had experienced in Korea?
There was none of that here.
Was this why they had scheduled the meal before the script reading?
Any useless icebreaking or forced bonding was meant to be done beforehand.
Without an ounce of mercy, Quentin immediately ordered them to immerse themselves.
“Start right from Scene 1. Alex Han’s past.”
.
.
.
“Isn’t this a blunder?”
The narrator’s voice came out laced with puzzlement.
The camera clung obsessively to a child’s fingers on the chessboard.
Twelve-year-old Alex Han, whose baby fat had not yet fully disappeared.
Across from him sat his opponent, an adult Russian grandmaster.
He was a fairly famous player in the chess world.
“He’s still too young. He must be nervous.”
Sighs rippled through the audience.
Unable to understand Alex Han’s move, the spectators let out dry laughs and predicted his defeat.
But Alex Han’s eyes did not waver.
His black pupils were calm as the abyss.
The one wavering was his opponent instead.
The grandmaster’s hand hesitated over the pieces several times.
Cold sweat formed on his forehead, and his breathing gradually grew rougher.
When he finally made his move under time pressure, Alex Han moved his piece at once, as if he had been waiting for it.
Tak.
The Queen cut across the diagonal and aimed for the King’s throat.
“Checkmate.”
For a moment, silence fell.
Then explosive cheers swallowed the arena.
Waaaah!
It had been a perfect trap.
The boy had thrown out his Knight as bait and taken the King.
“How do you feel? You’re the youngest champion in history!”
Amid the reporters’ barrage of questions, Alex Han gave a short reply with an expressionless face.
“I want to go home.”
He meant it.
The boy merely wanted to escape the commotion and go home to eat a warm meal made by his mother.
After the noisy awards ceremony ended, Alex Han got into the car with his family.
“You did well, son.”
It was night in the city, and rain was falling in a steady drizzle.
The car entered a long tunnel.
The orange tunnel lights swept across the inside of the car at regular intervals.
Bright, then dark.
That steady rhythm drew the boy toward drowsiness like a hypnotic spell.
How much time had passed?
Suddenly, a single headlight came racing in from the opposite road.
A light charging over the center line like a missile.
“Aaaaah!”
Someone screamed.
He could not tell whether it had been his mother, his father, or himself.
Screeeech—
Crash!
The world tore apart into multiple rupturing sounds.
The sound of metal ripping.
The sound of glass shattering.
The sound of bones breaking.
Blink.
Alex Han closed his eyes for a brief instant and opened them again.
The world had changed.
It was a white hospital room.
The boy sat on the bed.
His body looked fine, but his eyes were empty.
As if his soul had been trapped in that tunnel.
The doctor asked carefully, “Do you remember your name?”
The boy did not answer.
Instead, he pulled a chess piece from his pocket and held it up.
King.
From that day on, a vast chessboard had formed anew inside Alex Han’s shattered interior.
And in place of his hollowed-out self, the pieces began to awaken.
King, Queen, Knight, Rook, Bishop, Pawn.
Six personalities opened their eyes on that board.
The start of the script reading was not bad.
Even though they were scenes from supporting actors whose weight in the story was relatively low, their rhythm together was perfect and the acting was excellent.
Hollywood really was different.
There were no weak links.
Oh, and for reference, the child actor playing young Alex Han could not attend today’s workshop because of school.
So Quentin read the lines in his place.
It seemed that his loud claims of being fairly confident in his acting had not been mere bluster.
He handled the emotions of a twelve-year-old boy quite convincingly.
Of course, for a boy, that husky voice was a little funny.
“Good. Not bad.”
A smooth reading.
Just as everyone’s tension was starting to ease noticeably, Quentin abruptly shot to his feet.
Then he came back carrying a large Bluetooth speaker from somewhere in the room.
Thump.
He set the speaker down heavily in the middle of the table.
The actors’ eyes locked onto the black object.
“Everyone knows how important music is in my films.”
I naturally nodded.
Yes, just as he said, music was an indispensable element in Quentin’s films.
His signature style was placing a surprising song where it did not seem like it would fit the scene at all, then creating a bizarre tension with it.
“Film isn’t something you only watch with your eyes. Your ears steal from it too.”
Quentin’s eyes gleamed.
“In that sense, my script is closer to sheet music than writing. The actors have to get up on that sheet music and perform emotion on top of it.”
He tapped the speaker resting on the table.
“I’m going to play the very track I listened to until my ears nearly burst while writing this scene, and the one that’ll actually be inserted into the film.”
The actors looked openly flustered.
As if enjoying those expressions, Quentin grinned and added, “Don’t worry. It’s not hard. You just have to feel the rhythm and spit out the lines like you’re dancing. Simple, right?”
As if that could be simple.
If you did not pay attention to your breathing control, the music would bury your voice in an instant.
But if you became too conscious of it, your emotional flow would break apart just as easily.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
When Quentin operated his phone, the speaker vibrated and a majestic melody burst out.
“For reference, this is the first scene I completed when I wrote the script. That’s how clearly the direction is preserved in my head. So don’t fall behind my imagination.”
Quentin looked between Townsend and me.
Townsend was smiling, but the muscles beneath his eyes were twitching faintly.
As the music grew louder, it was almost visible how his pupils shook.
He was nervous.
As for me—
I was rather glad.
It was a good environment to test S-rank Dialogue Delivery.
I drew in a deep breath and adjusted the tension in my vocal cords.
“All right, then let’s watch Alex Han’s first revenge.”
.
.
.
A dim building.
A dazzling night view spread beyond the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and in the middle of the room sat a chessboard.
Beside it were two glasses of whiskey with ice.
Creak—
The door opened, and the adult Alex Han walked in.
Just like in childhood, his face was expressionless, but this time, there was something ruthless and chilly about him.
As a child, it had felt as though he knew no emotion.
Now, it felt as though he had removed emotion.
Brandon—
that was the character Townsend was playing—
forced a bright smile and said, “H-Haha. I didn’t expect you to ask to meet like this, Alex. It’d be troublesome if the association found out.”
His voice was partially swallowed by the music.
Flustered, he raised his tone, but it nearly cracked instead.
Meanwhile, Alex Han spoke in a soft, gentle voice.
“That’s why I chose this place. So no one would find out. Brandon, relax.”
People drew in sharp breaths.
Ryu Sunho’s voice had changed completely.
A soft, elegant voice created by minimizing vocal cord contact and mixing in ample breath.
It was clearly a man’s voice, yet it carried an oddly feminine and seductive nuance.
Even so, the firmness of the projection pierced through the grand orchestral melody and struck the ear with precision.
“R-Right... haha, thank you. But I thought you’d retired from chess. Why did you suddenly come back? Why?”
Alex Han gave a light shrug.
Even so, his gaze swept sharply across the chessboard.
“With my whole family dead, I had to find some way to survive alone.”
“That’s truly regrettable. I never imagined the police would close the case so absurdly quickly...”
“It wasn’t the police. The association closed it.”
Brandon, who had been swirling his whiskey glass, faltered.
“...What are you talking about? How would the association—”
“The detective in charge changed the day after the accident. And then the case was quickly closed.”
Alex Han smiled softly and added, “Brandon, why are you pretending not to know? Your signature is on the closure documents.”
Up to that point in the reading, the people in the living room were vividly painting the scene in their heads.
The cold air of the hotel.
The smell of strong whiskey.
The tension Alex Han radiated.
The problem was Townsend.
Whether because of the music or because he was too conscious of Ryu Sunho, he was preoccupied with merely reading along while slurring his pronunciation.
Naturally, his emotional line kept breaking, and his breathing failed to carry properly.
Each time that happened, Quentin’s eyebrows twitched, but he clenched his fist and endured it because he did not want to interrupt Ryu Sunho’s immersion.
Fortunately, as he had hoped, the reading continued.
After a brief silence, Alex Han picked up the Queen on the chessboard.
Then he set it down again.
Exactly in the center of the back row.
“Just because someone stands in the back doesn’t mean they know nothing.”
The voice was still soft.
But the ending of the line had sharpened.
At that subtle change, Townsend—or rather Brandon—flinched for an instant.
“W-What do you want from me?”
“Haha, I don’t want anything. I just called you here to show you.”
“To show me? Show me what—”
Alex Han pressed the remote.
The TV screen in the room lit up, and tunnel CCTV footage began to play.
A shocking scene of a black vehicle charging straight at another car like a missile.
Spotting something in the footage, Brandon shouted, “No, no! I was only following orders...! I did what they told me from above, from above...”
“Ah, so you just moved because someone above told you to? Hmm, that’s pretty similar to this, isn’t it?”
Alex Han pointed at the chessboard.
More precisely, at a white Pawn jutting out alone after leaving its own formation.
An abandoned piece.
Brandon cried out urgently.
“W-What do you want? Ah! Right, money! You said you started playing chess again because you needed money, didn’t you? I’ll give you as much as you want. No, I’ll give you everything I’ve saved up until now!”
“Money?”
Alex Han let out a short laugh.
At that moment, Ryu Sunho’s Adam’s apple moved sharply.
A metallic voice burst out, scraped harshly from the vocal cords.
“This bastard’s got no sense and talks way too fucking much.”
A beastlike growl.
The elegance from just moments ago had vanished without a trace, replaced by murderous ferocity that looked ready to bite someone’s throat out at any second.
Then, in 0.1 seconds, he shifted the resonance point upward again.
An elegant voice once more.
“Then finish it. We didn’t come here to do an interview, did we?”
“Ah, right. We came here to play a game.”
It was as if he had been possessed by ghosts.
In that brief span, two voices crossed out of one man’s mouth.
Not voice modulation, but a tonal change so real it seemed as though truly different souls had possessed him.
Isn’t this insane...?
He really feels like someone with multiple personalities...
No, forget the facial expression—how is he switching out his voice however he wants like that...?
Just as the people in the living room, who had been imagining the scene, rubbed both arms as though goosebumps had risen, the highlight of Flight of the Valkyries burst from the speaker.
The majestic sound of horns and trumpets rang out.
Pa-ba-ba-bam! Pa-ba-ba-bam!
In time with that overwhelming sound, Ryu Sunho drew in a deep breath and pulled the sound up from his lower abdomen.
The weight of his voice changed.
It poured out something heavy, authoritative, and impossible to defy.
“Stop stalling and move according to plan.”
“By the sequence.”
This time, from King to Knight.
A bizarre resonance, as though two voices were overlapping.
Alex Han picked up a piece from the chessboard.
In his hand was a black Knight.
The black Knight knocked over the white Pawn that had broken away from formation.
Tak!
“You crazy... you crazy bastard!”
The moment Brandon kicked his chair back and rose, Alex Han braced one hand on the table and lunged out.
His hand sliced through the air and caught Townsend’s wrist.
“Aah!”
Brandon let out a short scream.
“Where are you going?”
That mad voice pierced the ear.
Alex Han grabbed Brandon by the collar with his remaining hand, then dragged him toward the bathroom.
Overpowered by the rough force, Brandon’s feet scraped across the floor.
“Don’t you know the rule that pawns can’t run backward?”
Alex Han yanked Brandon’s tie tight and strangled him with it.
Then he shoved Brandon’s head into a bathtub full of water.
“Mmph!”
Brandon’s scream was swallowed by the sound of water.
Looking down at the crown of Brandon’s head as his movements gradually slowed, he muttered.
It was a heavy low voice again.
“Well done, Knight.”
Ryu Sunho spoke the final line and closed his mouth.
At the same time, the Wagner music that had been resounding so grandly stopped dead.
“......”
“......”
“......”
Only a heavy silence settled over the living room.
No one could easily open their mouth.
Even breathing loudly felt difficult.
Then—
Bang!
Quentin slammed his fist onto the table and leapt to his feet.
His face was flushed red with excitement and fury.
With a trembling finger, he pointed back and forth between Ryu Sunho and Townsend.
“Damn it! What the hell was that! Are you kidding me right now?!”
A roar like a lion’s bellow exploded out.
“How can the god of acting and a cockroach coexist in the same frame?!”
Quentin’s savage gaze stabbed into Townsend.