The Opening
"Ah, hello! I'm Hong A-yun, playing Hong Yu-jeong in this film. Looking forward to working with everyone!"
Applause rose around her at the words.
The atmosphere wasn't as warm and lively as it had been for Summer's Closet, yet it wasn't nearly as solemn as the table read for White Blood either.
One by one the cast rose to introduce themselves while the making-of camera operators captured every greeting.
Across the table, Yeon-woo quietly studied Hong A-yun.
Every production was different, of course, but a script reading was always the first time the actors truly matched their breathing. In most other projects the leads were veterans; they had either already worked together or at least studied one another's previous performances, so each performer already had a rough map of the other's style.
Hong A-yun, by contrast, had only a handful of commercials and music videos to her name. She had never carried a long dramatic arc in film or television, so no one in the room knew what kind of actor she would turn out to be.
I've heard she's good—talented, even…
Both Lee Yong-su and Jeong Cheol-min had spoken highly of her work. Yeon-woo himself had seen nothing beyond the short theater piece she had performed the day he went to cast her, and he was genuinely curious what she would bring.
The opening sequence required heavy CG and was almost entirely Hong A-yun alone, so they skipped it and began at the moment the two leads first meet.
"All right, let's get started properly. Page four."
At Director Lee Yong-su's cue, Yeon-woo turned the page.
Beside the director, Kim Ju-hyeong sat rigid with nerves, eyes darting around the conference room. Yeon-woo had spent the last several days in the director's office watching the two obsessive creators build the script from the ground up; his understanding of every beat was already absolute.
He let himself sink into the scene.
A woman lay unconscious on the wooden floor. Beside her a young man, looking thoroughly put-out, wrung a towel, dampened it, and laid it across her forehead.
"Doesn't seem sick… just drunk, maybe. But there's no smell of alcohol either…"
The wet towel was pure ritual. She had no fever; he simply had no idea what else to do, so he did the one thing he had seen people do on television.
Hong A-yun answered Yeon-woo's line. Though they sat in a conference room, the script called for her to be sprawled unconscious, so she scooted her hips forward on the chair and let her spine sink against the backrest. The sound a body makes while sitting is structurally different from the sound it makes while lying down; she adjusted for that difference.
"Mmmnn…"
The soft nasal murmur carried the exact quality of someone speaking from a horizontal position. Watching her shift, Yeon-woo felt a spark of interest and slipped deeper into the scene, answering in character.
Her meticulous physical choices pulled him under so completely that the woman across the table ceased to be Hong A-yun and became simply a half-conscious stranger lying on a wooden floor.
"Hey. You with me?"
"Mmm."
She only frowned, eyes still closed. He gave her a light shake.
"Looks like the booze has worn off. Try sitting up."
Her lids fluttered open. She flinched hard, threw a hand up as if to ward him off, and curled into herself.
"…Mmm? Hah—! Wh-who are you?"
"That's my line, don't you think? You were drinking, right? When I first found you I thought someone had dropped dead in my front yard. Nearly had a heart attack."
"…Drinking? Front yard?"
She pushed herself upright; the damp towel slid off her forehead and landed on the blanket. After a quick, bewildered scan of the room she let out a long sigh.
"Haa… Is this a dream? Or—wait—is this the afterlife?"
"…The afterlife? Well, if I hadn't found you and you'd spent the whole night outside, you might have ended up there eventually."
She paid him almost no attention, muttering to herself, then shook her head again.
"Ah—if I'm not dead, maybe hypoxia-induced delirium? Then this is a dream or a hallucination. That sound at the end means the reverse thrusters fired correctly…"
He stared at her, expression blank with disbelief.
"What on earth have you been talking about? The air up here is cleaner than anywhere else in the country. Hypoxia? You're still drunk."
There were probably only a handful of houses in all of Korea nestled deeper in the mountains than this one. The building had once been a small hermitage belonging to the temple farther up the slope; the abbot, deciding it was no longer needed, had simply handed it over to a young man who had nowhere else to go.
She sighed again, looked around once more, then fixed her eyes on him.
"Look. I don't know whether you're a ghost or just something my brain cooked up, but I'm a little confused right now, okay? Still—even if you're imaginary—thanks for putting the towel on my head and waking me."
Another sigh, another shake of the head, the face of someone who no longer understood her own actions.
"No, wait. This is all just my unconscious inventing things anyway, so what does it matter? But why do you keep talking down to me?"
He gave her the look of a man who had just discovered a new species of lunatic, then shrugged.
"Maybe I shouldn't have helped… You look younger than me. You're a minor, right? Already sneaking off into the mountains to drink."
"Huh…?"
She stared at him, dumbfounded, then let out a short laugh.
"Well, if that's how you see me, I suppose I should be flattered, but I must be at least ten years older than you. Ah—maybe this is another product of my unconscious. A handsome guy saying exactly what I want to hear."
He snorted.
"You're ten years older than me? I'm twenty."
"Sure, sure. This unnie is a '96."
"What's a '96?"
She tilted her head at the question.
"Can there really be a generation gap even with a person my own imagination invented? Looking at that soft baby fuzz on your face, you must have been born in the twenty-first century. You said twenty, so… '06?"
"…You are genuinely not in your right mind. This year is '06."
He thought for a second, then continued.
"So when you said '96 just now, you meant you were born in 1996? That would make you ten years old. Did you take something stronger than alcohol…?"
He seriously considered calling the police.
Meanwhile the woman, still convinced the man in front of her was a figment of her own mind, found that the numb, anesthetized feeling was beginning to recede. The air moving through the room, the particular humidity of a summer day, the faint flicker of the fluorescent tube, the slightly stuffy scent of incense that clung to the walls—and when she shifted because the seat was uncomfortable, the wooden floorboards creaked beneath her.
…Hmm. This is way too detailed.
She kept tilting her head. It was far too vivid for delirium, imagination, or dream.
"…Even so, this situation still doesn't make any sense."
"Well, you clearly aren't from around here. Anyone with you? Try calling them."
She muttered something under her breath, then looked straight at him.
"Right. A phone. I have no idea what's going on, but if—just in the one-in-a-million chance that this is real—there is somewhere I need to contact immediately, at the national level. Could I borrow your smartphone? No—could you please lend me your smartphone?"
His face went blank with incomprehension.
"…Smartphone? What's that?"
"…Huh?"
Only then did her eyes land on the calendar hanging on the wall behind him.
June 2006.
He had said it was '06 earlier as well. Of course it couldn't actually be the past. Anyone with a basic education knew how absurd time travel was; as a scientist she understood, in far more precise detail than most people, exactly why the idea was nonsense.
So if she assumed this was reality, which was more plausible—that the man in front of her suffered from a mental illness, or that she had somehow traveled through time?
"…So you don't have a smartphone. You mean you don't have a cell phone at all?"
"I have a cell phone. Latest chocolate phone—bought it with part-time money the second I graduated high school."
"…Cho-chocolate?"
The jet-black phone he pulled from his pocket looked at least twenty years old, yet its condition was impossibly pristine, as if it really were brand-new.
He's using an antique in A-grade condition like this…?
That level of dedication meant he was crazy, but meticulously crazy. She began to feel a faint prickle of unease.
"R-right. Anyway, thank you so much for helping me, and if I could just use that for a second to make a call— Huh?"
Her fingers brushed the necklace at her throat—the one her mother had given her. And now that she looked properly, the clothes she was wearing were familiar too: the light-wash jeans, white tee, and thin black cardigan she had owned years ago, garments she wasn't even sure still existed somewhere in the back of a closet.
And this is the necklace Mom gave me—the one I lost when I was twenty-four…
It had been her only keepsake from her mother. When it vanished she had cried and searched for three solid days and nights and never found it again.
Something was very, very wrong.
She all but snatched the "latest" chocolate phone from his hand and frantically began punching in a number.
It was a dialogue-heavy scene. In a single continuous location the two characters exchanged more than thirty lines, a dense weave of conversation and private monologue. They had to fire the lines back and forth at a rapid clip while still letting the audience understand, naturally and without exposition dumps, exactly what situation the characters were in.
It was a genuinely difficult stretch of writing. Yet the two of them locked together like the gears of a clock, as if they had rehearsed for weeks. Around the conference table, staff and cast alike felt a quiet rush of admiration.
Ryu Yeon-woo is feeding her the exact rhythm a half-beat early so she can land every line cleanly—leading without ever looking like he's leading. And even with that help, the way she rides the wave is flawless.
Oh Hye-suk, cast as the "supermarket grandma," had privately questioned the production's decision to give the female lead to a complete newcomer. Of course a supporting player with only a handful of scenes had no business complaining, but she had wondered whether the budget had simply run dry after securing Ryu Yeon-woo. Then she remembered the industry rumor that Yeon-woo himself was co-producing, which made the budget theory unlikely.
Listening to the two of them volley lines now, she felt certain that once cameras rolled the chemistry would fit the film like a second skin.
Director Lee Yong-su, watching the same exchange, felt his chest tighten with emotion. This was only the opening, yet the screenplay he had written was already coming alive in the world.
Yeon-woo himself registered none of the surrounding gazes. He was already lost inside the pages.
Acting is fun…
Trading lines with the actress across from him, he suddenly realized he was enjoying himself more than usual. Acting had always been interesting, always absorbing—but today something new had been added to the mix. They were only reading, nothing more, yet every exchange felt as vivid as if he had stepped fully into that other world.
I want to start shooting this movie right now.