Cheon-yeong Is Already Complete
Barely a meter tall, with a fair face and delicate hands—no commoner, then. Her stride was short for her height, enough to make him wonder if her legs troubled her, but she held her spine straight and her center of gravity never once swayed, so it had to be something else. Her clothes were a far cry from what a child of an ordinary yangban household would wear. What connection did she have to the Dangsan Tree...?
While Yang Ho-gun was piecing together the child's identity, a group of women came hurrying toward them from the distance. Every last one of them wore her hair combed smooth and braided down her back, and they were dressed alike in spare gray clothes, until it was nearly impossible to tell one from the next. The woman at the head of the group ran to the child first.
"Sinnyeonim!"
The child they called Sinnyeonim said nothing, only opened her arms toward the woman. The woman scooped her up lightly—and only then noticed Yang Ho-gun and Kang Geon-bok. Her eyes narrowed, the corners lifting in a sharp, wary slant.
"And who might you be?"
Kang Geon-bok froze, at a loss for what to do, but Yang Ho-gun put on a good-natured smile and launched in with easy, thick-skinned charm.
"Aigoo, well, you see, we got so caught up chopping wood we didn't even notice the sun going down! As you well know, the mountains at night get so cold you could freeze to death, and if you're unlucky a tiger might make a meal of you, so we came scrambling down in a panic, and—ah, wouldn't you know it!—we must've taken a wrong turn and ended up here. We spotted this village and thought we might impose for just one night, and then we saw that magnificent Dangsan Tree and figured we ought to pay our respects, and, well, the young lady was there, so..."
"Address her as Sinnyeonim."
Another woman behind them snapped the correction, and Yang Ho-gun hunched his shoulders and ducked his head. Kang Geon-bok followed suit. Listening to someone lie so boldly, so casually, he couldn't keep his face under control.
"Oh my, yes, yes. Sinnyeonim was there—we didn't know she was Sinnyeonim at first, of course, but she seemed like no ordinary person, so we were offering a prayer together. Asking to make it through the night safely, you see..."
The rambling, rustic speech seemed to ease the other women's suspicion a little. But the woman holding the Divine Maiden still wore a guarded look as she stroked the child's back, and Kang Geon-bok watched Sinnyeonim's face with anxious eyes.
The Divine Maiden, however, merely rested her head on the woman's shoulder and showed no reaction at all. Not even as Yang Ho-gun lied through his teeth.
The woman who had clung to her suspicion to the last raised one eyebrow, as if the child's indifference had caught her off guard, but she pressed no further.
"Bow three times to the spirit of the Dangsan Tree, then follow me. I'll give you a room."
And so Yang Ho-gun and Kang Geon-bok entered the strange village. A village over which the Dangsan Tree's shadow fell, cold and eerie.
"Director, how about a smoke?"
The moment filming wrapped and they returned to the production lodging, the cinematographer came looking for Hong Il-beom. Hong Il-beom had quit smoking once his child was born, but a film shoot was the exception. They headed for the smoking area set aside at the lodging.
"Hah, that's good. That's good. Couldn't smoke up in the mountains, so I've been climbing the walls."
"If holding out for half a day is that hard, maybe it's time you quit for good."
"Come on now. I'm no superhuman like you, Director. It's not that easy."
They had been close since they were young. Hong Il-beom could tell at once that the cinematographer was choosing his words carefully. Soon the man's mouth opened.
"Il-beom."
He dropped the formal speech he kept like a blade in public, especially during a shoot.
"Lately I can't tell what kind of picture you're trying to paint."
"For someone who can't tell, you've been painting it pretty well."
"That's just the years we've spent falling into step with each other. I shoot it this way and that, and it comes out. You know what I'm getting at."
"Hmm..."
He was right. If they had been shooting with anyone else, it would have taken far more time to pull the frames he wanted.
"And this isn't about the work itself."
"Then what?"
"The atmosphere on set. I went back and forth a lot about whether to say anything, but I figured I'd feel better if I talked it through with you."
The atmosphere on a set tended to follow the director and the leads, for better or worse. Hong Il-beom looked blunt and sharp-edged, but on set he was a director who knew how to loosen the air, and the actors, this being their first time carrying a film, had been careful not to sour the mood at all. For those reasons a good atmosphere had formed in the early days of the shoot—but discontent was beginning to stack up now.
"You know blown takes aren't just hard on the actors. Resetting the angle, the lights, the sound—once or twice is one thing, but if we keep reshooting four or five times every setup like this, the kids are going to collapse before we even get to the back half."
There were actors who didn't spare a thought for whether the staff were suffering, but the ones shooting with them now, at least, were not that kind. Even if no one voiced a complaint to their faces, once a climate of exhaustion took hold it was bound to wear on the actors' condition as well. And then the blown takes would only multiply—the same vicious cycle, over and over.
"There's no way you don't know all this... so watching you do nothing is enough to drive a man insane."
It was a question shared by every staff member who had worked with Hong Il-beom more than twice, the cinematographer included. Hong Il-beom, for his part, wanted to ask something else.
"Do you think I ought to step in, hyung?"
"You're good at that kind of thing. You step in, diagnose it once, and it all gets sorted out."
"But good acting doesn't only come out of a comfortable atmosphere."
"What?"
"You've seen how the actors perform in front of Su-a. How they get better."
"Well, sure—if you keep shooting, they might improve. But the opposite is just as possible. That's people for you."
Hong Il-beom gave a short laugh.
"I take it you haven't been watching Su-a act."
"Come on. With that kid, looking away is the hard part..."
"Su-a has taken more blown takes than anyone, and not once has her performance wavered."
"Ah, no way—"
The cinematographer searched his memory and stopped mid-sentence. When blown takes piled up, you naturally watched the actor who'd caused them and paid less mind to their scene partner. But in the fragments that lingered in his memory, Lee Su-a had been delivering the same quality of performance every single time.
Hong Il-beom glanced at the speechless cinematographer and spoke with quiet satisfaction.
The cinematographer, at a loss for words, exhaled a long stream of smoke. It wasn't wrong. If anything, it made sense. Any filmmaker who wanted to make a good movie would have agreed with Director Hong Il-beom.
"...Still, go soothe the kids a little. You know they're running themselves ragged."
"Of course I do. I'll take a look around the whole set tomorrow."
"Right. Thank you, Director."
The cinematographer put his formal speech back on and stubbed out his cigarette in the portable ashtray.
Before filming began, Director Hong Il-beom walked the set, inspecting every corner. The word inspection put the staff on edge, but when they saw the director simply looking over their meals, their beds, their holding areas, their discontent eased a little.
The root problem, however, remained unsolved. This was nothing more than a stopgap, a prescription that could crumble at any moment.
"So according to the legend, it was the Imjin year, some two hundred years ago! The Japanese bastards invaded, and the whole country was thrown into chaos. The court sent troops out to fight as hard as they could, but it was a time when they could hardly spare soldiers for a backwater village like this. And those wicked Japanese took that opening and came all the way here! Smashing houses, tearing up the fields, snatching calves to roast and eat!"
Yang Ho-gun and Kang Geon-bok listened to the man in a daze. The woman who tended the Divine Maiden had said she would give them a room—and then led them to the room this man was already occupying. Sharing a room on such short notice ought to have displeased him, but the man had welcomed them instead, sat them down, and launched into a full-blown oration.
"And then! In that moment when the Japanese blades brought a wind of blood and everyone else held their breath and hid—Sinnyeonim alone was brave enough not to hide, and for three days and three nights she offered prayers before the Dangsan Tree! Her bearing was so solemn that even those vulgar Japanese couldn't bring themselves to lay a hand on her. And on the third day, the spirit of the Dangsan Tree borrowed Sinnyeonim's body and thundered at the Japanese invaders."
For a moment Yang Ho-gun was taken in by the sheer absurdity of the situation and the man's dazzling way with words. Then he snapped back to himself, and took a proper look at the man.
The story was climbing toward its climax.