The Regressed Writer Became a Genius Director

Chapter 2 of 5

Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Script Appraisal

"Cut the power!"

Geonwoo's voice rang through the funeral-hall set.

The youngest member of the lighting team stared at the wall-mounted light in confusion.

"What?"

Geonwoo shouted again.

"Right now!"

The crew member instinctively reached for the power switch.

Click.

The light went out.

At the same time, Geonwoo stepped backward.

His body remembered the moment that light had swallowed his vision in his previous life.

Crackle...

A brief sound came from inside the switched-off light.

A small spark jumped.

A faint burning smell rose from the cable.

The entire set froze.

"What was that?"

"You heard it too, right?"

"Didn't sparks just come out of the light?"

Hyeonsu, the assistant director, moved first.

"Everyone, move back!"

He raised his hand and pushed the staff away.

"Don't touch the equipment! Only the lighting team should check it. Cut the power completely, just in case!"

A senior lighting technician put on gloves and approached the unit.

After inspecting the front, his expression hardened.

"Hey, there's a crack in the front glass."

The youngest crew member went pale.

"What?"

"The cable's burned too. If we'd kept this thing running, it could've been dangerous."

The set erupted in murmurs.

"Sunbae."

The youngest lighting crew member carefully looked at Geonwoo.

"How did you know?"

Geonwoo couldn't answer immediately.

How did he know?

Because in his previous life, that exact light had exploded and blinded him.

But he couldn't say that.

Still looking at the light, Geonwoo answered briefly.

"It looked strange earlier. The light was flickering slightly."

He slowly steadied his breathing as he looked at the dead light.

The light that had swallowed his eyes in his previous life had gone dark this time.

That fact alone almost made his legs give out.

But he couldn't relax yet.

Geonwoo looked around the set.

The staff were watching him.

The actors were watching him.

He was the director responsible for all of them.

"Let's stop filming for today."

Hyeonsu immediately turned toward him.

"Hyung?"

"We'll inspect all the equipment again and reschedule."

Geonwoo looked at the lighting team.

"Don't use any equipment that has problems. Check every cable too, please."

The senior lighting technician nodded.

Hyeonsu clapped his hands once.

"We're wrapping for today! Check first to make sure no one's hurt. We'll only pack up the equipment after the lighting team finishes inspecting it!"

Everyone began moving busily.

Hyeonsu came over.

"Hyung."

Geonwoo looked at him.

This was the same guy who had worried about him until the very end in his previous life.

Geonwoo could see Hyeonsu's eyes.

"Hyung, are you okay?"

Geonwoo answered a beat late.

"Yeah. I'm okay."

It was a lie.

Only moments ago, he had been dying.

He had screamed for help inside an overturned taxi.

Then he'd heard a mysterious voice.

And with that voice, he had returned six years into the past.

Back to the exact day when he'd lost everything.

Hyeonsu looked even more worried.

"Are you really okay? You look terrible."

Geonwoo forced a smile.

"Yeah. I'm okay. Thanks for worrying."

"That could've been seriously dangerous."

"Seriously. We tried to save money on the production budget and rented cheap lights. That's what caused this. From now on, let's rent better equipment, even if only for safety."

That night.

Geonwoo returned to his studio apartment.

Even after taking off his clothes and hanging them over a chair, he stood there for a long time without moving.

He was staring at his own face in a small mirror.

"I avoided the accident. I kept my sight."

Geonwoo carefully raised a hand and touched around his eyes.

He rubbed his eyelids hard with the back of his hand.

He could still see.

Only then did it finally feel real.

"I really came back."

The moment the words left his mouth, all the tension inside him collapsed.

Geonwoo sank onto the edge of the bed.

His fingertips trembled.

Not just his fingertips.

His entire body shook faintly.

Everything hit him at once.

The sound of the light exploding.

The sensation of glass piercing his eyes.

Six years of darkness.

The taxi crash he'd just experienced.

The overturned car.

His body refusing to move.

His desperate cries for help that no one answered.

Geonwoo covered his face.

His breathing gradually became faster.

"Haa..."

He stayed bent forward for a long time.

It felt as though that final voice was echoing beside his ears again.

This time, under your own name.

Geonwoo lifted his head.

"Who was that voice...?"

There was no way to know who it belonged to.

But from Geonwoo's perspective, this regression was nothing short of a miracle.

He had avoided the accident that took his sight.

Now, he wanted to personally direct the scripts he had written in his previous life.

"In this life, I'll direct my own scripts myself."

Not only the movie scripts he had written before, but also the stories he'd imagined on his own, thinking they would work well on streaming platforms.

He wanted to direct all of them.

And he wanted to establish the film production company he had always kept as nothing more than a dream.

"I can start again."

At that moment, one person's name came to mind.

Professor Moon Taeseok.

The man who had stolen Geonwoo's script in his previous life and crushed him until the very end.

A director who had once represented Korean cinema.

Compared to him, Geonwoo was still a rookie who hadn't even made an official debut.

In this life, he promised himself that he would surpass his former teacher, Director Moon Taeseok.

"I can't beat him now. First, I need to make my own name known as a director."

Geonwoo had spent six years working as a screenwriter in his previous life.

When it came to writing, he was confident he could compete with anyone.

But making a movie required more than writing a good script.

To direct a movie himself, he needed an opportunity.

Investors, actors, and production companies all cared about reputation.

No matter how good a script was, a rookie director who had only just graduated from university couldn't realistically make whatever movie he wanted.

"So first..."

Geonwoo slowly raised his head.

A shooting script sat on top of the shoe cabinet by the entrance.

It was the script for Before the Light Reaches, which he'd brought home from the set.

He stood and picked it up.

"I need to finish this movie properly."

An old neighborhood facing redevelopment.

After losing her parents and raising her younger brother on her own, Seorin becomes convinced that his death was not an accident when he is found dead after filming something suspicious in an alley before dawn.

A missing camcorder memory card.

Police officers eager to close the case as an accidental death.

And her old friend Minjae, who appears at the funeral hall.

Following the final traces left behind by her brother, Seorin comes face-to-face with the truth of what happened before dawn and what caused her brother's death.

Geonwoo's graduation project had been selected as the best project at school.

Thanks to funding from the university's creative support program, he'd been given the chance to make his first feature-length independent film.

Before the Light Reaches was the script he'd written for that movie.

But in his previous life, the accident had robbed him of his sight, and he'd never been able to finish it.

"This time, I'll finish this movie no matter what and submit it to the Busan International Film Festival."

First, he wanted to read the script again.

Geonwoo sat down at his desk.

He switched on an old desk lamp and began reading.

"The script isn't bad. Considering it was written by a student, it's actually very good."

The Baek Geonwoo of that time had genuinely believed he'd written an excellent story.

But now he could see problems he hadn't noticed back then.

After becoming visually impaired in his previous life, he'd given up on becoming a director.

Instead, he had clung to writing because he had to find some way to survive.

As a result, he had become an exceptionally skilled screenwriter.

"If I rewrote this now, I could make it much more interesting."

At that moment...

Words appeared in front of him.

[Would you like to use Script Appraisal?]

Geonwoo's hand stopped.

Just before he'd noticed the dangerous light earlier, words had appeared in front of his eyes.

Now they were back.

[Title: Before the Light Reaches]

[Remaining Appraisals: 3/3]

The ability supposedly showed the overall completion score of an entire script and gave short comments on its strengths and weaknesses.

"So I wasn't imagining things."

When he'd first seen the messages, he'd been so confused by suddenly returning to the past that he'd assumed he'd imagined them.

But seeing them again confirmed it.

This really was an ability he had gained.

"It said I'd awakened the Director's Sense and that the first sense had been unlocked. That means there's probably a second sense too..."

Naturally, he became curious about what other senses might unlock in the future.

"Script Appraisal can be used three times per project, right?"

In other words, it wasn't an unlimited ability.

He would need to carefully choose when to use it.

But right now, he wanted to know the current level of the script in his hands.

[Script Appraisal has been activated.]

Geonwoo felt slightly nervous.

He wondered what score it would receive.

A moment later...

[Title: Before the Light Reaches]

[Completion: 74 points]

[Remaining Appraisals: 2/3]

Geonwoo's eyebrows twitched.

Seventy-four points...

More comments followed.

[Strengths]

The gloomy mood and emotional atmosphere are clearly established.

The sense of loss experienced by those left behind after the younger brother's death is relatively vivid.

Locations such as the funeral hall, dawn alleyways, and the neighborhood awaiting redevelopment have strong visual imagery.

[Weaknesses]

The protagonist's motivation to investigate is weak.

Minjae's guilt functions more as a plot device than as part of his inner character.

The neighborhood remains merely a backdrop.

The truth behind the incident remains a personal secret and fails to expand into broader structural pressure.

[Overall Comment]

For a student project, this is a highly polished script. However, as a feature-length independent film, it lacks enough momentum and thematic density in the middle and later sections to hold an audience until the end.

The story moves toward the question of "who killed him," but the film's message has not yet been connected to the structure of the entire story.

After reading the comments, Geonwoo grinned.

"That's frighteningly accurate."

The ability had identified exactly the strengths and weaknesses he himself saw in the script.

"This ability is pretty useful."

No matter how skilled a writer became, no first draft was perfect.

And because writers inevitably became attached to their own stories, it was extremely difficult to view their work objectively.

In other words, Script Appraisal could help him judge his own scripts with brutal objectivity.

"It might be useful even after I start my own production company someday."

Geonwoo looked at the script.

"Still... if I really want to improve this movie, I'd like to rewrite the whole thing from the beginning."

But filming had already started.

The production budget was tight.

Writing a new script and restarting filming from scratch would not be easy.

"But if I'm doing this again, I want to make a better movie."

Geonwoo calmly analyzed the current story.

In the original script, Seorin's younger brother accidentally witnessed a drug deal in an alley before dawn.

He filmed it with his camcorder.

And because of that, he was killed.

Minjae had helped with the deal because he needed money.

He had known Seorin and her brother since childhood, but guilt eventually destroyed him.

"It's not bad."

There was secrecy.

Betrayal.

Guilt.

But to the current Geonwoo, it was too simple.

"If I leave it like this, it basically becomes a story about Minjae being the bad guy."

The story suddenly became narrow.

Seorin chased the culprit.

Minjae suffered from guilt.

The truth was revealed at the end.

That was all.

"It's too predictable..."

Geonwoo picked up a pen.

"What if Seorin's brother didn't just accidentally see the drug deal?"

Because he was sad that the neighborhood was disappearing, the boy had been filming it with their father's old camcorder.

While doing so, he began noticing strange things that had been repeating in the neighborhood for a long time.

For example...

Sensor lights that went dark at the same time before dawn every week.

Strangers entering houses left empty because of the redevelopment.

Residents who saw those things and deliberately pretended not to notice.

And Minjae hadn't been helping with the drug trade from the beginning.

"Instead, he was doing errands for his mother."

Minjae's mother was one of the last remaining residents in the redevelopment area.

She looked after the keys to several empty houses and occasionally opened doors for demolition workers or real estate agents.

On the surface, it wasn't strange.

But at some point, the errands became suspicious.

Minjae, I left the key to House Number Three under the mailbox.

Turn off the sensor light in the back. They said the neighbors keep complaining because it turns on whenever a cat passes.

No matter who comes, pretend you don't know anything. They're just people from the construction side coming to inspect things.

At first, Minjae didn't think deeply about it.

The houses were going to be demolished soon anyway.

He didn't think hiding a key or turning off a sensor light was a serious matter.

But that night, unfamiliar men entered the dark, empty house.

And Seorin's brother filmed them with his camcorder.

"Good."

At the same time, Minjae's mother wouldn't be the only adult in the neighborhood responsible.

The residents knew drug deals were happening in their soon-to-be-demolished neighborhood.

But each of them cooperated a little because they could make some money.

One kept the keys to an empty house.

Another guided outsiders through the neighborhood.

Someone else told them when cars could enter.

Another knew where the CCTV blind spots were but said nothing.

Seorin wouldn't discover that one culprit killed her brother.

She would discover that the entire neighborhood had become involved in his death, little by little.

All of their silence had come together to kill him.

"Then Seorin's story changes too."

She was no longer someone simply chasing a murderer.

By following the truth behind her brother's death, she would be forced to confront the darkness created by the entire neighborhood where she had lived.

"That completely changes the funeral scene."

In the original script, Seorin received mourners at the funeral hall while Minjae hesitated outside the door because of his guilt, then turned away.

But with the rewritten story, every resident who came to pay respects would be hiding something.

An older woman wiping away tears in front of the memorial portrait.

She had known where the key to the empty house was hidden that night.

A middle-aged man burning incense.

He had seen a strange car enter the alley.

And that was why Minjae couldn't enter the funeral room.

His own involvement filled him with too much guilt to face Seorin.

And the faces of the adults standing among the mourners were too horrifying for him to look at.

"This gives Minjae much more depth, and the redevelopment neighborhood stops being just a background. The whole story becomes much more interesting."

Just imagining it was disturbing.