A person can die overnight, but neither a human nor a drama production company can come back to life in just one day.
Of course, there were exceptions.
For instance, when a crazy writer shows up with his own money.
“Chief, here are some gift certificates. Use them to buy some meat, and if it’s alright… could we use the village hall for a bit?”
The first filming location for *The Chaotic Twelve Earthly Branches* was decided to be a nameless village somewhere in North Chungcheong Province. It was a village that appeared on maps but where nobody ever went.
The reason they came to such a remote area for scouting was simple. The price was free. Cooperation was 150%. No negotiations were necessary. The village elders simply told them to do whatever they wanted and didn’t even pay them much attention.
That was because this was Lee Junghyuk’s hometown.
“Oh my, isn’t this the Lee family’s son? Goodness! I heard you became a writer. Your parents in heaven must be so happy!”
His facial features and the DNA inherited from his father authenticated his identity faster than any printed script could. Lee Junghyuk bowed his head in greeting, and the elders welcomed him like a successful prodigal son, ignoring the rumors on the news.
The village hall became the waiting room.
The filming set was a rice paddy, and the ‘rural home of the family serving the Twelve Zodiac Guardians’ in the script was decided to be an old tin-roofed house owned by the village chief. There were more bugs and fewer electrical outlets than a typical art set. However, the price was an infinite discount! To be precise, it was resolved with the official premise: “Just use it! We have to support our local young man!”
As soon as Director Park Sang-tae got out of the car, he saw a pot of boiled pork in front of the village hall. He fell silent at the sight of the steam rising from the pot and the staff dressed in tracksuits.
“…What exactly is going on here?”
The question wasn’t directed at anyone in particular. In fact, he was on the verge of receiving an even bigger shock. Upon seeing the Aladdin TV panel set up at the village entrance, the elders were misunderstanding it as some ‘strange pansori channel.’
Lee Junghyuk stirred the meat expressionlessly. The pork was simmering, and Park Sang-tae was overwhelmed by the smell before he could even look at the script.
“…Writer, are you… are you really the one cooking the soup?”
“This is boiled pork. A writer writes lines, and pork is boiled.”
“No, what are you talking about? I mean… why are you doing this yourself, Writer?”
“You said we should save the budget. It’s expensive to buy food outside. This is currently local coexistence.”
Local coexistence.
That word wasn’t in the script, but it became the most frequently heard keyword on set. The lunch menu consisted of boiled pork, mustard leaf kimchi, soybean paste soup made by the elders, and young radish kimchi brought by ‘someone’s mother.’
The staff ate in silence, and the actors discussed the concentration of the soybean paste soup before they even started the camera tests. The lead actress, Seojiwon, tossed out a comment.
“Wow… Writer, you could open a restaurant like this. You’re going to get more famous for the food than the drama.”
“Then I wouldn’t be able to pour money into the drama,” Lee Junghyuk replied shortly and went back to boiling meat.
Beside him, Park Sang-tae was slowly losing his sense of where he was standing.
The camera position was in front of the rice paddy. The power lines were pulled from the village chief’s house, and the village hall became the actors’ waiting room, the staff lounge, and a warehouse for instant coffee mix. Makeup was handled inside a tent, and costumes were managed on top of a ‘moving cargo bed’ parked on the roadside.
The hair dryers were plugged into the village hall’s outlets, and as for the ironing… nobody knew who was doing it.
Park Sang-tae opened the script. However, the first thing that caught his eye instead of the lines was a plastic container filled with earthworms.
“…What is this?”
“It’s a prop. Real earthworms. I dug them up from the rice paddy bank myself.”
“…You caught these yourself? Why? You can buy them for 10,000 won at a fishing shop.”
“Ten thousand won is a pound of pork belly. With a pound of pork belly, two adults can easily have a meal.”
“…”
That morning, the village chief handed over a flat of freshly laid eggs and some rice cakes with a wish for “good filming,” and the elders brought out chairs to the village hall yard to watch. Occasionally, some elders were drafted to ‘appear on television’ for the first time in their lives. In other words, they became free background extras.
Appearance fees? None. They were excited just to see a local young man’s work and to appear on TV while they were still alive. Their appearance was an act of goodwill, their acting was purely for fun, and the camera was like a toy to them.
Park Sang-tae slowly lifted his head. Before his eyes was a landscape not in the planning proposal, an energy not in the budget sheet, and people more real than the script. And Lee Junghyuk was casually catching worms for his work.
“Start filming with those. I’ll go catch more if they’re not enough.”
Park Sang-tae felt a bit dizzy looking at the cuffs of Lee Junghyuk’s trousers, which were covered in dirt.
“Grandmother! I’ll sing a song for you!”
In the middle of the village hall yard, Seojiwon was holding a microphone and singing “What’s Wrong with My Age” at the top of her lungs to a backing track. The karaoke machine wasn’t rented; it was something a staff member had brought for personal use in their car, and the amplifier was connected to Director Park Sang-tae’s home Bluetooth speaker.
“Just… what… is this situation?”
Park Sang-tae squinted against the sunlight, and in his field of vision, he saw the elders clapping along to the song. The actress Seojiwon looked more like the elders’ lovely granddaughter than a professional performer. The song was surprisingly pitch-perfect, and it was filled with soul.
“Oh my, she sings so well! Where did that girl come from?” one of the elders asked in admiration, and the village chief standing nearby spoke proudly.
“She’s an actress! An actress! She came down to film a drama here. What was the name of the drama…? What was it? The one with the animals. There are chickens, cats…”
“Ah! *Animal Farm*?”
Park Sang-tae tried to ignore the conversation and turned away, but an even more serious sight was unfolding on the other side. Cheon Na Young was massaging a village elder’s shoulders, while An Yoo Seok was passing around a basin full of snacks.
“Here, please have some nutrition. You’ll be filming a scene today!” he added.
“Oh my, young people these days are usually so cold, but these kids… they have so much heart.”
The elders who received the snacks patted their bellies with satisfied faces. Park Sang-tae clutched his head. More accurately, he suppressed the urge to tear his hair out and walked into the hall, where he encountered yet another ‘horror.’
“Where did the ladle go? I told you, the firewood fire will go out if you do it like that!”
Im Seong-hee was shouting at the top of her lungs with a ladle in one hand, while Jeong Tae-mi was preparing cabbage and radishes she had received from the elders to boil kimchi soup in a large cauldron. The scene looked less like the catering department of a drama set and more like a scene from a documentary about youth rural volunteer work.
“…Excuse me, is this lunch?”
“Yes, the writer boiled the meat. A Korean meal needs soup. It’s hard to eat if there’s only protein, you know?”
Park Sang-tae couldn’t say a word because everyone speaking was so dead serious.
Lee Junghyuk was digging through the rice paddy bank with a shovel on the other side of the yard. When someone jokingly asked, “Are you digging for worms?” he actually answered.
“Yes. It looks natural only if there are real earthworms. CG is expensive these days.”
He didn’t stop shoveling. His posture, his expression, and his intent were all serious. Park Sang-tae blankly watched his back for a moment.
A filming set where the writer digs for worms. The soup is boiled by the sub-writers, the actors provide songs and massages for the elderly, and the villagers volunteer as extras. It was a bizarre circus. He thought to himself.
‘Why is nobody… saying this is strange?’
It felt as if he was the only normal one and this entire world was abnormal. But he was wrong. Nobody was abnormal. Rather, everyone seemed natural as if they had found their place, and he, standing among them, was the most awkward one.
An elder approached him and said, “Director, sir. Should we just stand there when you film later? Should we wear something special? When I was on TV a long time ago, I wore a dress shirt.”
Park Sang-tae finally couldn’t hold back his laughter. He wasn’t even sure if the laughter coming from his mouth was an escape or an acceptance.
“…Yes, just stay as you are. That will be… more natural.”
—
That afternoon, Park Sang-tae sat on a chair in front of the village hall, drinking instant coffee from a paper cup. The scent was somewhat muddy to be called a rich coffee aroma, yet it wasn’t unpleasant.
The staff were taking notes on Lee Junghyuk’s boiled pork recipe, and someone was memorizing the order of making kimchi more accurately than the script. On one side of the village hall hallway, Cheon Na Young was laughing and sharing half a block of tofu with the elders.
This was definitely a drama set, but he couldn’t understand why he kept feeling like he had been dragged to an agricultural cooperative promotional campaign.
As the sunlight setting over the roof gently covered the eaves of the hall, an elder sat next to Park Sang-tae and gulped from a bottle of rice wine. Lee Junghyuk was carrying meat at that moment. His forearms were strained, he was dripping with sweat, and for some reason, he looked unnecessarily cool.
“Is that fellow… the leader of your team?”
“…He’s the writer.”
“What? That guy is a writer?”
“Yes.”
“Hahaha, writers these days are truly amazing.”
The elder simply laughed, but Park Sang-tae couldn’t. He felt that if he laughed now, it would be like admitting to something he didn’t quite understand.
The preparations for filming were finished, and the temporary set built in front of the rice paddy was being organized. If it were a shoot in the city, they would have calculated labor costs first, but here, more than half the work was resolved with the word “help.”
Fortunately, the cameras and lights were professional equipment, but half the people holding them were locals who had said, “It’s my first time, so it’s fun.”
Yet, strangely, everything was moving faster and more efficiently than any shoot he had ever seen. Park Sang-tae watched the scene blankly and thought, ‘How can this be possible…?’
Just then, Lee Junghyuk approached with the worm container. A few live worms were wriggling inside, and Lee Junghyuk silently placed the container down in front of Park Sang-tae. The worms were crawling very slowly, and their movement didn’t seem gross; it almost looked like they were actually acting.
Park Sang-tae stared at the container for a long time. In this nonsensical situation, Lee Junghyuk was the impossibly serious center. At first, he had thought this set was just the play of crazy people. The crudeness caused by the lack of budget, an atmosphere more like a traveling troupe than a drama set, a reading session with more greetings than lines, and a set where the writer boiled meat and the actor massaged elders.
But now, at the center of that chaos, Lee Junghyuk was digging the earth and catching worms with his own hands, bringing them over to the staff as if it were nothing.
Park Sang-tae realized at that moment. Lee Junghyuk was sincere. It wasn’t about directing, fame, or art; for the sole reason that this work had to turn out well, he dug for worms, boiled meat, and secured the hall. He was a person who ‘willingly chose to become someone else.’
Park Sang-tae sat back down. Someone handed him an instant coffee, and he took it, saying quietly, “Right. Well, one way or another, it’ll work out.”
The words left his mouth, but no one replied. Everyone was doing their job, and everyone was living on this set like it was a real set. In other words, the filming had already truly begun.
At 1:00 PM, it was finally time to start the first take.
In the front yard of the village hall, the staff were readjusting the camera positions, and the words ‘Scene 1 – On a low hill, a sun-drenched afternoon’ were printed on the filming schedule.
Park Sang-tae sat in front of the monitor, tense, while Cheon Na Young stood by the chicken coop at the entrance of the village, having just finished her preparations. She held the container of worms in her hand, and the styling team busily adjusted her clothes and boots until the last second.
Lee Junghyuk quietly opened his notebook and checked the notes for each scene. He was the writer, but at the same time, he was the general producer, the accountant, the catering manager, and a representative local youth entertainer who held a monopoly on the elders’ trust.
“What about the chickens?”
“Three are out. One that was released earlier wandered around and went up on the roof, but an elder just grabbed it and brought it down.”
“Good. Adjust it so they don’t enter Na Young’s path.”
No one found that strange. As usual, Lee Junghyuk maintained the most ‘set-like mindset’ in a place that wasn’t a set.
But then, a small frown appeared on Park Sang-tae’s forehead. He saw dark clouds forming in the sky.
“…Huh? What’s this?”
He slowly looked up from the monitor, and as the lighting team looked up, they tilted their heads in unison. It was gray, certainly moving, and the clear sky was pushing clouds in a direction that extinguished the light like a silent joke.
“Director Park, there’s some cloud cover.”
“Yeah… I see that.”
Lee Junghyuk also looked up at the sky. He frowned slightly, looked around, and said nonchalantly, “The wind is blowing east, so it’ll only be shaded for a moment. It’ll probably pass within ten minutes.”
The words were more like optimistic hope than a conviction, but strangely, people trusted him.
However, the sky looked different to Park Sang-tae. He opened the script again. It was a scene where sunlight was crucial. If the light on the actor’s face was dampened from the very first scene, the entire mood could be ruined.
‘This scene needs a clear, transparent morning feel… If it rains, we’re truly doomed.’
His hands began to sweat naturally, and he had no Plan B in his head. There was no time or manpower to set up again on this day, at this timing, in this village, under this sky.
The elders were still peaceful. Someone was stirring the soybean paste soup pot behind the hall, and someone else was sitting on a plastic chair, watching the staff move as if enjoying a performance. One person even pulled out a smartphone and started filming, and Seojiwon was more focused on posing for that screen than practicing her lines.
And then, the lights went out.
More precisely, the sunlight vanished. A gust of wind swept through, stirring dust over the roof, and a chicken craned its neck toward the distant mountains and cried.
*Cluck-cluck.*
Park Sang-tae looked down at the script and muttered quietly.
“…It really can’t rain right now.”