100. Romantic Dreams and Romance
100. Romantic Dreams and Romance
Even after the trailer for <Liam Walker: The Revealed Threat> was released, we kept shooting.
Why release the trailer before filming was even done, you ask?
If we hadn't, my inner attention whore Allen might've caused another incident.
Still, chucking a stick of dynamite in the trailer did calm me down a bit.
With that under my belt, I figured I could go half a year without staging another explosion.
"You've matured, Boss."
"I grow every day."
"I'll give you this one."
I basked in Nikolai's praise and got back to filming.
Just so you know, shooting Liam Walker over summer break wasn't my idea—it was the production crew's collective decision.
Making a blockbuster of this scale with their own hands made every single day too damn fulfilling, they said.
On top of that, actors who'd been cast but hadn't appeared in Part 1, crew members eager to strike while the iron was hot, and students who didn't want latecomers stealing their thunder all piled in. The summer-break shoot was adopted almost unanimously.
- Fuckin' hell! Let me take a break too!
- Shut the hell up! You're the one who turned us into this!
I'd originally planned to take it easy over the break and prep other projects, but the students strong-armed me into it. I had no choice but to green-light the shoot.
You asked if I seriously got steamrolled by students?
There was no beating sheer numbers.
So here I was, stuck opening a summer-session course I'd never asked for and shooting a film. That was the current state of affairs.
Enough griping about the past.
I shook off my idle thoughts and focused on the shoot.
The second chapter of the Liam Walker series, <The Revealed Threat>, was where the true mastermind began to emerge in earnest.
Happy-happy academy life was over!
Now students started dropping dead and blood started flying!
I'd more or less settled on the series' mastermind concept.
The concept was an utterly despicable racist.
The goal: immortality and the extermination of all non-human races.
Villains of this stripe were a dime a dozen in this world too, so it was kind of clichéd, but the classic route was classic for a reason.
It was the most stable and safest option, which was why it had become the classic route.
Besides, with rookie crews handling the shoot, overcomplicating the story would only make everything a giant headache.
"Let's go vanilla. Vanilla."
Nikolai agreed with my take.
With the framework settled, we assigned the mastermind role to a student.
Not one of the finalists, though.
"Congratulations. Your role is now Morse."
"M-M-Me?"
Slumped shoulders, slightly unkempt hair, lifeless eyes.
He exuded a gloomy aura, his whole body practically screaming, 'I'm a total loner.'
This guy, Bolar Thompson, was in the same magic-track cohort as Jace. Nothing about him really stood out.
Yet Nikolai and I believed in his potential.
One sentence on his résumé practically begged us to cast him as the mastermind.
- Completed the curriculum at the Body-Strengthening Magic Tower before entering the Academy. After graduation, wish to continue training at the Necromancy Tower and the Tower of Destruction.
What does that have to do with potential, you ask?
Put it this way and you'll understand immediately.
- "I've already finished graduate school, and after I graduate from the Academy, I want to attend two more."
The instant I saw the understated lunacy packed into that single sentence, I was certain.
This was the guy.
This bastard. If we put him on a job, he'll deliver.
And of all things, necromancy and destruction magic?
Could there be more perfect credentials for a mastermind?
Of course, we didn't pick him on that alone.
Bolar was a student who'd been cut during the third week of auditions.
But as far as we could tell, he'd been eliminated over simple bad luck.
Week 3—the Emotional Arc test. He'd shown such a severe inability to immerse himself that he got the axe.
As judges who'd had eyes on him since Week 2, we couldn't understand why he'd delivered such a shit performance.
And only after the auditions ended did we figure out the reason.
He specialized in villain roles.
He couldn't handle the hot-blooded energy of a hero, but when it came to projecting the madness and malice characteristic of a villain, he plunged right in.
It wasn't simply because he was gloomy. Whether we cast him as a pathetic villain, a charismatic villain, or a complete lunatic, he handled it all well. He was simply built for villain roles.
From the moment we grasped this, we'd already slated him for Morse.
He had one flaw, though: precisely as his appearance suggested, he had zero confidence.
And, wouldn't you know it, the second we offered him the part he was already waving us off, insisting a reject like him who'd washed out in Week 3 had no business playing a villain.
Even as he waved us off, though, his eyes were glued to the script. Not exactly the behavior of a guy who didn't want the part.
'Then there's a good way to handle this.'
So we set up a hidden-camera prank for Bolar and Bolar alone.
Same as always, we handed scripts to the extras and instructed them on their performances.
The scene was an all-out brawl in the Academy plaza: students fallen into a state of derangement, attacking each other.
But to heighten the realism and immediacy, we'd given the extras their own lines.
- Remy, I've hated your guts for ages!
- You're one to talk. I never once thought of you as a friend, got it?
That sort of thing.
Naturally, with dozens of people spewing abuse all at once, nobody could keep track of who'd memorized which line.
That was exactly the chaotic vibe we were going for.
But amid the bedlam, Bolar's script was special.
- Perform the action you deem most appropriate to the brawl.
He was the only one we didn't give a line to.
The man himself never imagined he was the sole recipient of such a direction. So, exactly as we'd hoped, he started slipping into Method acting all on his own.
- You! You're the one who turned me into this!
Without any separate prompting, he remembered the extra he'd been assigned was from the south, adopted a thick southern accent, and launched into a harrowing curse against his opponent.
Bolar had thrown himself into an impassioned performance, never dreaming that only his feed was being recorded separately amid all the chaos.
Once the brawl was over and the actors were catching their breath, we summoned Bolar privately and showed him the footage.
"Still want to say you've got no talent?"
In the end, Bolar took the role of Morse.
*
To cut straight to the conclusion, casting Bolar as Morse was the right call.
No—he exceeded our expectations.
Even Bolar, who'd started out acting reluctantly, had fully become Morse by his fourth scene.
After that—maybe because he'd grown genuinely attached to the character—he started actively researching Morse.
And from the tenth scene on, he began asking Nikolai directly about Morse's past, his goals, his thoughts, even his plans.
We worried that spelling everything out might lead to a leak, which would've been a disaster, but in the end we told him the whole story.
Because the acting he'd shown us so far was that exceptional. And because we believed the deeper his understanding of Morse, the more he'd repay us with even more extraordinary Method acting.
And, true to our hopes, he reinvented the character of Morse.
- It's all your fault...! Your fault...!!
Though it wasn't in the script, Morse killed his own subordinate by using a human voice to give form to death.
He'd used necromancy to weave together a death rattle, a banshee's shriek, and a wraith's lament into a single voice.
What's more, for the execution scene, instead of just killing his subordinate physically, he grabbed the man's face, summoned a false soul onto it, and delivered a performance that looked as if he were sucking the soul right out.
The ad-lib was so brilliant we couldn't help but applaud on the spot.
The extra had been so overwhelmed by Bolar's acting that he'd forgotten to play dead. It hadn't been a one-take performance at all.
Even so, that scene was an unforgettable piece of masterful acting, even for me.
Moved by Bolar's ad-lib, Nikolai decided to overhaul Morse's entire concept from the ground up. That's how good his performance was.
The interesting thing was that Bolar's effect on the set didn't end there.
- "Shut your mouth, Mephisto."
Not to be outdone, Jace began igniting his own thespian fervor.
He too threw himself completely into the character of Liam Walker and began pulling off his own improvisations.
And it wasn't just Jace—Anna did the same, and even Leon joined in with an ad-lib extravaganza of his own. Soon enough, not a trace of the originally intended scenes remained.
And did Nikolai just stand by and watch?
Of course not.
Nikolai tore up the script right in front of the actors.
(For the record, it didn't tear easily, and things got a little awkward for a second.)
Along with his performance, the blazing creative heat that had engulfed the crew instantly fizzled out.
Every actor froze, thinking the director must've blown his top.
But contrary to expectation, Nikolai grinned at them and said,
"My apologies. I've been severely underestimating all of you."
While everyone stood there flabbergasted at the sudden apology, Nikolai continued his explanation.
Watching their performances in Part 1, he'd assumed this level of acting would be too much to ask for in Part 2. So he'd been writing the script with compromises.
But after seeing them act, he had no choice but to change his mind.
The students were growing, while he had arrogantly pigeonholed them by his own yardstick. He was utterly ashamed.
The actors gladly accepted Nikolai's apology.
And after thorough discussion, everyone reached a conclusion: scrap all the footage shot so far.
It was like a master potter refusing to release an unfinished piece to the world.
You asked if it was okay to do that with academy money?
"There's a certain recklessness only students can get away with. I'll take responsibility, so do as you wish."
I gave the go-ahead.
This body was Allen Price.
My motto: it was faster to ask forgiveness than permission.
And I was the man who'd been forgiven even by the Emperor.
Something as small as the academy's forgiveness, I'd just earn it back with a fiery hot floor-prostration.
Of course, things never actually came to that.
The Headmaster gave his cheerful permission.
He said failure was a young person's privilege and not to worry about it, just shoot it from scratch.
In the end, we wound up having spent the entire break wasting time without filming a thing.
But throughout those two months of vacation, the word "romantic ideal" took root in our hearts.
*
The second semester started, and the reshoots began with the revised script.
Perhaps because we'd already gone through the first semester and the intensive term, our shooting pace had picked up by quite a bit now.
What had taken three months to film in the first semester looked like it would take only two at that rate.
And during that period, a peculiar group formed on our set.
The Jace-Leon-Anna-Bolar squad.
Here came a question.
Why was Bolar wedged in among the trio?
The reason being, he was the protagonist who had drawn out the students' masterful performances.
Ever since the romantic spirit had saturated our studio starting with him, he had become the set's superstar.
True to his appearance, he had been a super-loner and found that atmosphere uncomfortable, but thanks to Jace the human capybara and Leon, who handled people well, he managed to adapt to it.
And somehow, amid all that, he got swept into that trio—that was the whole story of the incident.
It did make you wonder what kind of picture it painted to have the final boss be chummy with the three leads, but the work and reality were separate, so I decided to let it slide.
Though, their being on good terms aside, we'd run up against another new problem in this situation.
"How do we get the Sean-Hannah coupling together...!"
I clutched my head and immediately launched an emergency conference with Nikolai.
It was fine up to the point where we cast them in close roles to connect them.
The problem came after.
There wasn't a single trace of a rosy vibe between the two of them...!
Leon, for his part, still—whether by the power of Fate or because he was drawn by the mature(?) charm Anna had from all her regressions—showed interest now and then.
The problem was Anna.
This woman. Her romance cells had all died off.
The moment Leon tried to approach her even a little romantically, she'd shut him down like an iron wall, saying she wanted to focus on acting right now.
It was almost a mystery how that woman had ever ended up with Leon in the original work.
Of course, I understood.
If you added up all her regressed lives, her romantic cells would have been old enough to shrivel up and die.
But I hadn't expected it to be that bad!
At that rate, it was headed for a pure-hearted solo ending for Leon!
And the empire was heading straight for the civil-war ruin route!
Only then did we realize that simply assigning each character an in-film partner didn't automatically connect the two in real life.
To link them together, we urgently needed to resuscitate that Anna woman's romance cells.
The problem was, Nikolai wasn't exactly savvy enough in that area to advance the relationship between the two.
The kid was sharp on romance, sure, but when someone was that indifferent to the opposite sex, he claimed there was no way.
Half-grumbling, I took my frustrations out on an innocent Nikolai.
"You have a lover yourself, so why can't you solve this?"
"What's my lover got to do with this? And Boss, your own romance cell count isn't exactly high enough to be throwing stones."
"What's that got to do with me?"
"Argh, you damn."
We bickered with Nikolai over this topic for several minutes.
Meanwhile, I suddenly thought of Nikolai's lover.
"Come to think of it, isn't your missus a Hero from the Temple of Love and Family?"
"Yeah. Why?"
"Well then, she'd be the expert. Why are we the ones fighting each other?"
"Aha."
As you might have inferred from the name, the Temple of Love and Family housed romance experts.
They also served as matchmaking agencies, and when it came to coupling, they were second to none.
Nikolai immediately contacted his lover.
As we explained the situation while concealing the fact that Anna was a regressor, there was a hiccup where Ash suspected Nikolai of having an affair, but thanks to my desperate defense, we managed to avoid a Nice Boat.
[In that case, you could hire a priest from the temple as a film consultant.]
Come to think of it, the Temple of Love did provide services like that.
At the Temple of Love, you could seek consultation when you wanted to add natural romance to a film without ruining its artistic merit.
We'd never had a reason to use it before, since we only shot non-romance productions, but other film companies hired priests as consultants almost like an established custom.
Except the problem was that what we wanted wasn't the coupling of Sean and Hannah in the film, but the coupling of Leon and Anna in reality.
Fortunately, Ash had taken that issue into account when she made that suggestion.
[Of course, our usual job is to bring characters together within a film, but as an extension of that, we can also use a film to bring the actors together. Just as you did for Nick and me, Allen.]
"...You knew about that?"
[Heh heh. I'm very grateful for it.]
We thanked Ash and immediately booked a Portal ticket.
Before we ended the call with her, I thought she'd said something about how the temple might be a little different than we imagined and to brace ourselves, but I paid it no real mind.
*
The fastest and most reliable Temple of Love I knew of was in the Sanctuary of Parma.
It took practically no time to get there if we took a Portal, so without a moment's hesitation, we headed straight over.
After arriving at the Sanctuary in no time at all, we located the Temple of Love and submitted a visitor's request, then waited at the door.
While waiting, Nikolai asked me.
"You explained this to me before, didn't you, Boss? That inside the Temple of Love, they teach you professional methods of how to be loved by the opposite sex."
"That's right. It's why actors affiliated with them include a lot of great names in romance."
Especially in that current era, with the Hero vs. Demon King genre past its prime and religious-romance hybrid films trending, the Temple of Love's prestige was nothing short of immense.
If I had to draw a comparison, you could consider Nikolai's girlfriend the equivalent of a major corporate executive.
Following my explanation, Nikolai offered his own conjecture.
"So, would they be running something like bridal training in there?"
"I suspected it was something along those lines."
I agreed with his take.
The Temple of Love-affiliated Heroes I'd met so far were people who'd attained a profound art in bewitching others.
Seeing that, it made me rationally suspect they might get some kind of bridal training inside the temple.
After that, as Nikolai and I speculated about this and that regarding the temple's interior, the response to our visit request returned.
It said that a regular debate was being held inside the temple just now, so we could enter as observers and meet with the Archbishop afterward.
"Regular debate?"
What would they be debating?
Holding our curiosity close, we headed toward the conference hall.
The moment I opened the hall doors, raised voices hit me from the far side.
- "'Harem pure love' is a contradiction in terms! The two concepts are mutually exclusive from the start!"
- "No, they are not! Pure love means sincerely loving someone! If you sincerely love every member of a harem, that is harem pure love!"
- "In the scripture <The Love of Lord Berdos>, the Lord clearly loved all five of his wives!"
- "But doesn't Goddess Grasis ultimately grant her reluctant approval? And didn't she herself decree that sincere love should be blessed?"
- "That's nothing more than a compromise forced on her because our Lord keeps expanding his harem! In truth, our Goddess wants her followers to remain faithful to pure love whenever possible!"
A bizarre verbal clash was taking place on the platform between the two debaters.
Wondering what on earth was going on, I looked toward the center of the stage and saw today's debate topic written there.
- <Is a Harem Doctrinally Just?>-
"..."
For the sake of Nikolai, who stood beside me utterly speechless, I put every effort into defending the current situation.
"The meeting topic may be a little strange, but just think of it as an ordinary religious debate. Something like a clash between scripturalists and fundamentalists."
It was a clash between scripturalists, who valued the text of the scripture itself, and fundamentalists, who insisted on returning to the religion’s original purpose.
Understanding it that way, it was at least a little...
- "I’m telling you, a harem isn’t pure love!!!"
Hell's bells.
Even I couldn't cover for this one.
Good god, what was even the point of this argument?
But as if to prove my lament irrelevant, in this temple that lived and breathed by the concept of love, it seemed to be a matter of grave importance, and the debate raged on fiercely without conceding an inch.
And the conclusion was that the talks broke down, and it was decided to resume the debate at the next opportunity.
They left the question of whether harems counted as pure love in a gray area and moved on to the next topic.
The facilitator scrawled the next topic across the board in large letters and shouted it out.
- "Our next topic is: Is a childhood friend who appears later truly a childhood friend?!"
Wordlessly, I pressed my hand to my forehead.
"No... This is not another world...!"
And from beside me came the wail of a pitiful dreamer whose fantasies about another world had once again been shattered to bits.