The Last Shoot in the Snow
The wound makeup for the shoot was so realistic that I kept feeling genuine pain from it.
I can describe Shin Ji-won's acting in one word: inconsistent. He performed well whatever acting he felt drawn to, and failed at whatever he didn't. In other words, when he could immerse himself emotionally, he was good; when he couldn't, the performance fell apart.
Despite that instability, the visual side of this drama mattered so much that the production had cast Shin Ji-won on his face alone.
Before every take, Shin Ji-won kept trying to build an attachment with me, convinced that without that bond the acting wouldn't come.
He was the polar opposite of me as an actor. I have never understood what a relationship between actors has to do with acting. I could perform a love scene with my mortal enemy. Acting is acting. No—acting is what makes it acting.
Still, I decided to accept that different kinds of actors exist. If I didn't, curses would slip out every time he botched a take. Ha. My pre-regression temperament was perfectly suited to getting by in life—never once did I come down with a stress illness.
In any case, the director's decision to reshuffle the shooting order for Shin Ji-won, who had spent the whole morning whining that his attachment wasn't forming, had been the right call. The moment Shin Ji-won saw me, his face drained white. That wasn't acting. That was over-immersion. But just for today, I was willing to grant that over-immersion, too, counted as part of the craft.
Seong-woon: "Does your eye hurt? How much?"
Eun-ha: "Hyung. Listen to me first."
Seong-woon: "Let's go to the Leader first. We'll tell him there."
Eun-ha: "You can heal it."
Seong-woon: "I can't. If I heal without the Leader's blessing, I'll be excommunicated."
Eun-ha: "And that bastard gets to demand that?!"
Seong-woon struck Eun-ha across the cheek mid-sentence.
As Shin Ji-won staggered back, startled by how hard he'd swung, Eun-ha snarled through the blow.
Eun-ha: "Hyung. Open your eyes and look at it straight. This place is a fake."
Seong-woon: "How can it be fake, when we were given our gifts by the divine?"
(Eun-ha pulls his hand away from his eye and reveals the socket, now empty of its globe. Seong-woon freezes.)
Eun-ha: "The Leader takes whatever he wants—money, sexual favors, all of it—does whatever he pleases, and beats and kills anyone who won't obey. Hyung, if a god that wicked really existed in this world, it would have no reason to exist. And if it has no reason to exist, then what else would you call following that kind of hollow illusion, if not fake?"
The instant the director called cut, Shin Ji-won was peering at my face.
"Does it hurt? What do I do? God, seriously, what do I do? I'm sorry."
"Hyung, we have to shoot multiple takes anyway. It's acting—don't make a fuss over this, and stop apologizing."
At my words, Shin Ji-won finally surfaced from his over-immersion. Then he laughed and buried his face in both hands. That seemed to be a habit of his.
My body was still young, apparently, because now and then I caught myself copying the habits of the person beside me. I'd have to be careful about that.
"Hey, when we shoot your death scene, I think I'm going to wail. What am I supposed to do about that?"
"You said you couldn't get immersed."
"I was immersed before the slate even came down. From the second you stood there covering your eye. I had it wrong. So this is what it feels like to click with someone……."
From then on, he got misty-eyed every time he looked at me.
He truly was a different breed of human, my exact opposite. Setting aside which acting was right or wrong, I found myself worrying whether this man could keep acting for very long. First he worried himself sick over failing to immerse, and now he was worrying himself sick over immersing too much.
If this was how he acted, it might be thrilling for now, but at some point the exhaustion would catch up, and the hard roles would become roles he no longer wanted to play.
Come to think of it, Shin Ji-won hadn't acted for very long, or very much. After his military discharge, he'd all but vanished from my sight—probably because he'd focused on singing and variety shows. I knew nothing about that world. But then again, precisely because I knew nothing, one thing was certain: he'd lived solidly, without stirring up a single scandal.
I hoped he'd keep his eyes on his own lane and just act. Going by his face, his acting, or his physique, he was so relentlessly appealing that I hated to admit it—but Shin Ji-won was not a bad actor.
When it came to an actor's performance, a director's discretion was a domain you couldn't afford to ignore. Naturally, at my level it made no difference, but for Shin Ji-won it had been an enormous help.
The shoot proceeded smoothly, and the final scene of my not-so-lengthy screen time arrived before I knew it.
My last scene was the fall from the cliff. On the final day of November, when we filmed it, snow came pouring down.
"Oh, wanna build a snowman? That's cool."
For the first time, Shin Ji-won's presence felt welcome.
The truth was, this long-legged giant's head sat far too high on his frame, and I'd already been calculating the perfect angle at which he alone could lift it for me.
"Hyung, you just need to hold this head part up."
"You see me for one second and put me to work?"
"I'm giving you a chance to participate."
"Smooth talker."
Shin Ji-won grumbled but lifted it up for me anyway. Then he took a step back, studied the snowman, and said,
"You…… can't do most things, can you? Anything besides acting."
The proportions were all wrong. As if we'd defied the laws of physics, the thing refused to be round no matter how carefully I'd rolled it. It was a strange phenomenon.
For all his grumbling, Shin Ji-won then kept snapping photos of the snowman—and of me. He always had a camera in hand, ceaselessly shooting something. I asked him about it.
"Hyung, why are you always taking so many pictures?"
"Making memories. So that when I'm a grandpa with nothing left to do, I'll have something to look at. More importantly, aren't you taking way too few photos?"
"I might turn out to be a terrible grandpa. I could die around thirty-two, you know."
I'd been so focused on the snowman that the honest words slipped straight out of my mouth. Shin Ji-won, whose emotions had been seesawing all day thanks to having to film my death, answered,
"Don't say things like that. It doesn't even sound like a joke, because you really don't take any photos."
Frankly, I only understood just now why I didn't take photos.
Without realizing it, I had apparently been preparing for my death at thirty-two. No wonder Woo Woong-bae was always telling me an actor couldn't afford to go without pictures. By the time I turned thirty, nobody would be looking for me anyway—what would be the point of leaving photos behind? No family, no friends. There wouldn't be a single person in the world who'd ever go looking for pictures of me.
Now I had to rack my brain quickly, because Shin Ji-won—already emotionally fragile from shooting a tragic scene—was visibly on the verge of breaking down. At that level of fragility, he might wail himself into exhaustion before the take even started. If he needed recovery, the shoot would be pushed back, and if the shoot slipped even one day, the production budget would……
I asked Shin Ji-won:
"Is there no other reason? Besides making memories. A reason that would justify taking lots of photos. If you give me another one, I'll take them."
"Another reason, huh……"
Shin Ji-won thought for a moment, then broke into a wide smile at me.
"You smile for a second when a photo's taken, even if only briefly. How about this—you take photos in order to smile? You barely ever laugh as it is."
"Hm."
Smiling is a good thing, I suppose. Excessive smiling isn't, but. Looking at it that way, it actually made a certain sense.
If what mattered wasn't what you left behind, but the moment you took the picture itself—
Shin Ji-won said,
"Then since we're on the subject, let's take one with you smiling. Come stand next to the ugly snowman."
"Don't call it ugly."
"A not-ugly snowman……"
"You don't have to force that one, either."
I stood beside the snowman and, just as Shin Ji-won had asked, took the photo with a smile on my face. He checked the picture on his camera, then crouched down where he stood.
"Ah, it looks like the last photo someone ever took before they died. Here come the waterworks again."
"What is wrong with you."
"Heeyoon, do me a favor and just keep being rude all day today. Cut out the over-immersion."
"Oh?"
In that case, my true nature would——
I was mid-thought when CEO Gam Seong-beom, standing off in the distance, somehow caught wind of it and frantically crossed both arms into an X. He must have read my mind. Ha. My true nature. It's really not that bad.
Still, it wasn't a bad thing, keeping to Do Jae-yeon's list of 'rules that earn you a beating'—that there was someone out there trying to photograph me, to keep a piece of me behind.
Who knew—maybe even after I died, Shin Ji-won would look back on this set at least once and pull up my photos. Thinking that, taking pictures felt worthwhile after all. I should have someone else shoot them with his camera, though. The fact that I wanted to be remembered a little—it must be some kind of human instinct too.
The snow turned to rain and began to fall.
The set descended into chaos. With weather like this, having the actors get soaked on top of everything raised serious health concerns, and sharp words flew back and forth during rehearsal.
Setting aside the budget problems of a delayed shoot, of all days, someone from the OTT side had come to visit that day. They wouldn't say who it was, calling them simply "a staff member," but the air around them practically radiated seniority.
Director An Ji-seong walked over with his hands clasped behind his back and tapped the shoulder of Lee Heeyoon, who sat bundled in a puffer jacket under the tent.
"Eun-ha. What do we do? This rain won't let up."
He was certain of it anyway. Lee Heeyoon answered.
"Isn't real rain better? More authentic."
"It's not better. You can't control real rain."
"I guess."
"It's freezing out. The rain."
"I like it."
"You're catching a cold, guaranteed. You've been starving yourself for days."
"Once we finish this, I get to go home, don't I? I'll just be sick there, whatever."
Since the kid kept answering with a face that was starting to find him annoying, Director An Ji-seong quickly sat down across from him and read the script through with him.
What he learned during that brief acquaintance was that reading lines with Lee Heeyoon was a bit like being the person who takes a puppy for its walk.
As they read through the final scene together, Director An Ji-seong had no end of trouble hiding his pounding heart.
Not once, not a single time, had Lee Heeyoon's acting ever fallen short. To be perfectly honest, An Ji-seong was convinced: Lee Heeyoon had been pulling Shin Ji-won's emotions along by the hand this entire time.
The reason Shin Ji-won's performances had been so hit-or-miss was that he was the kind of actor who chased his own feelings. That is, unless his emotion arrived first, his immersion stayed shallow.
And for a Shin Ji-won, Lee Heeyoon was the perfect partner.
Lee Heeyoon acted with ruler-straight precision. With Shin Ji-won, neither he nor anyone else could predict what the performance would become until immersion took hold. But Lee Heeyoon was an actor who could deliver the same performance a hundred times, in a hundred different circumstances.
Lee Heeyoon knew the perfect answer—an answer no director, no writer, could ever find fault with. Of course, being able to know it, and then express it so fully that you drag your scene partner inside that answer with you—well, that territory belonged to genius.
Director An Ji-seong called writer Choi Yu-jin every single day to talk about Lee Heeyoon.
"I'm telling you, the kid is insane. When I'm shooting Lee Heeyoon, it's like solving the exam with the answer key spread out next to me. He keeps showing me the answers. All I have to do is point the camera. God, I really can't keep working with him. I'm scared I'll get lazy."
Lee Heeyoon, who held the answers, could lift Shin Ji-won's emotions to where they needed to be.
He kept hauling Shin Ji-won up by the scruff, as it were, and shoving him down into the abyss of feeling. It was pure Spartan training—but it put Shin Ji-won's focus at Max level from the very first frame. Wandering through that abyss with something close to agony, Shin Ji-won was delivering a tremendous performance.
As the set gradually readied itself, Lee Heeyoon shrugged off his puffer jacket and said,
"Worry about Ji-won hyung instead. I think that man's going to be crying for a while. The body gets better with medicine, but the heart doesn't heal so easily. From what I've seen of people."
"You talk like you're not someone pain ever touches."
"It doesn't touch me. Acting is acting."
Funny kid.
Director An Ji-seong chuckled under his breath. In front of Shin Ji-won, drowning in grief, he'd kept his own expressions carefully managed—but he knew he had no need for that in front of Lee Heeyoon. This was an actor who could be howling with laughter at a comedy one moment, and a few seconds later, perform a parent mourning a lost child.