….
"CAN I READ THE SCRIPT PLEASE!! ALSO–"
Gavin blurted out, his voice rising in enthusiasm–
"...can I confirm that your next film is going to be about the Zombie apocalypse? Who are you going to collaborate with this time? A superstar again? Or a debutant?"
Samantha interjected immediately. "No, you are still not officially part of the team yet, nor was your position confirmed. Even then, before you can look at any active manuscript, you will need to sign an NDA–"
"Okay, give it a read." Regal said softly.
Usually, Samantha would have simply sighed and let it go.
It wasn't as though this was the first time Regal had followed the usual procedure without waiting for every box to be checked.
But, to be honest, something about Gavin's questions bothered her.
They sounded less like those of a storyteller and more like those of a journalist digging for information.
Samantha turned to him. "The legal department hasn't even processed his background check yet. If this leaks to the trades..."
"Well, I do understand your concern, and this dude definitely looks a bit too quirky," Regal said with a faint smile, waving her concern away. "I'm sure he wouldn't dare sell our script. Would you?"
"OF COURSE NOT! WOULD NEVER!" Gavin virtually screamed as he raised his hand like he was taking a vow–
"I will put my phone in the locker! Leave my bag outside! Just let me look at the pages!"
"See…" Regal's smirk widened.
He gestured to the empty chair near the window. "Take a seat, Gavin. I want to see if your confidence has any backing with your skills."
The statement was a little strange.
Gavin was the one about to read the script, yet somehow, it felt as though he was the one being evaluated.
He didn't wait for Samantha to draft a compromise.
He immediately lunged for the manuscript, grabbed it with both hands, and retreated to the corner chair.
Samantha folded her arms, watching Gavin take his seat. "I still think we're being far too casual about this."
Regal glanced at her with an amused smile. "You're really not going to let that go, are you?"
"Because you're the one who will tell me I should have stopped you when something inevitably goes wrong."
"What the? I never did that."
….
For the next hour and forty minutes, the trio get busy with their own world.
Samantha returned to her work as she cleared the remaining casting schedules.
But occasionally, her eyes would drift toward the corner of the room.
Gavin was literally still, while reading the script.
At the start of reading Regal's descriptions of the tight, steel-walled passenger vestibules, his mind was actively constructing the physical requirements to complete the shot.
But as he moved on to read the sequence where the infection first breaks out; then the subtle, terrifying transformation of a single train attendant in the narrow corridor.
He couldn't think about anything else but get immersed.
And then came the middle acts.
The pitch-black tunnel sequences….
Where he found that the infected could only track by sound in the dark.
Gavin's breath hitched as he read the sequence where the three main survivors have to crawl through the luggage racks above the heads of dozens of blind, snarling infected while the train cut through a mountain tunnel.
The timing of the tunnel passage was exactly eighty-four seconds.
When Gavin finally reached page one hundred and twelve, he came upon the final sacrifice, the protagonist's choice to save his daughter on the rear platform of the locomotive, written with such raw, unadorned emotional truth that it made his throat tighten.
He slowly closed the heavy white cover, the title [Train to Catch] feeling strangely heavy in his hands, then sat in silence for a moment before looking up at Regal, who was still reviewing something.
"Seriously..." Gavin muttered, staring at the script cover. "You told me this was a zombie film, but where the hell are the zombies? The word 'zombie' barely appeared twice in the entire script."
"Is that a problem?" Regal asked, clearly amused.
"Not exactly..." Gavin scratched his cheek. "I just expected more screaming. You know, the usual stuff. 'Zombieee!' 'Zombie!' Maybe someone pointing dramatically at one and screaming it three times just to make sure the audience gets the message."
Regal laughed. "You are funny. I will give you that."
"Also…."
"Also?" Regal asked, still focused on his monitor, though the corner of his mouth twitched.
"There isn't a single gun in the hands of the protagonists."
Regal finally looked up.
Gavin spread his hands. "Come on. You have a massive zombie outbreak on a high speed train, and these people are fighting with baseball bats, their bare fists and... duct tape?"
"Who the hell wraps duct tape around their forearms before fighting monsters?"
Regal leaned back in his chair. "Every film world is different. Besides, I want the audience to understand one simple thing. In this world, a single scratch can mean death."
"Which explains the duct tape?"
"It helps."
Gavin stared at him.
Regal chuckled before continuing, "The lack of firearms is intentional. I want that to be part of the film's tension. Without a gun keeping the danger at a distance, every confrontation becomes close and physical. They have to get within arm's reach of something that can kill them with one mistake. Every swing, every grab, every second they spend fighting becomes more dangerous."
Gavin stared at him for a moment. "Says the guy who invented gun-fu."
Regal blinked.
Then he laughed. "Hah. Really?"
"Yeah. You gave Hollywood people slow motion gunfights and now you're telling me baseball bats are more exciting."
"I am saying the characters don't have a choice."
"Uh huh."
Despite himself, Gavin couldn't help staring at Regal with a strange mixture of amusement and admiration.
The man had somehow managed to turn what should have been a simple zombie movie into something that felt far more deliberate than he had expected.
And the technical detail was almost ridiculous for a filmmaker this young.
"Zombie movement..." Gavin murmured as he tapped the page.
"You literally wrote, 'The infection is a total seizure of the nervous system. Muscles contract violently. Joints bend at unnatural, potentially bone-breaking angles.' Where the hell did you even come up with that?"
Regal shrugged. "I am putting breakdancers, contortionists and physical performers into the stunt pool, and I have already contacted a specialist choreographer who worked on [John Wick]. I want us to develop a consistent movement language. Their heads should twitch violently and their limbs move independently, so when they hit the floor, they shouldn't simply crawl but look as though something beyond their control is dragging them."
Gavin's expression sharpened with interest. "So the body itself becomes part of the horror."
"If they still move like normal human beings, even distorted ones, the audience's brain will recognize the pattern. The moment that happens, the fear drops. I want it to feel like the body is actively fighting against its own nervous system."
Gavin nodded slowly before glancing back at the production notes. "And if we're using contortionists with practical silicone prosthetics, the call sheet is going to be a nightmare. We can't have sixty stunt performers sitting in a holding tent for four hours waiting for their scenes. Sweat is going to compromise the adhesive, especially around the facial pieces, and once those edges start lifting, it will be obvious under a 35mm camera."
He flipped another page. "We need staggered makeup calls. Small groups at fixed intervals, maybe twelve-minute waves depending on how complicated each prosthetic application is. That way the performers arrive, get fitted, run through a quick movement check and go straight to set instead of sitting around long enough for the makeup to start failing."
Samantha, who had been quietly listening from the side, finally looked up from her notes.
For the first time since Gavin had walked into the room, she didn't look skeptical, but a bit impressed.
She had expected him to praise the script, maybe point out a few things he liked and complain about the lack of guns.
Instead, he was dissecting the production notes and immediately identifying practical problems that could have caused serious trouble during filming.
Gavin flipped the page, his eyes catching the lighting cues for the interior passenger cars.
"This is great," he muttered, his eyes widening as he looked over the production notes. "You're shooting ninety percent of the film inside these narrow, steel walled train cabins. I can already imagine the kind of tension that could create."
Gavin slowly closed the script for a moment, his fingers resting on the cover.
Even after finishing the screenplay, he found himself wanting to see this story unfold on the big screen.
More than that, he wanted to be there when it happened, to be part of the team and the film.
This film is going to be a clinical, highly sophisticated experiment on audience claustrophobia.
But what truly left Gavin staring at the manuscript in a state of absolute, stunned silence was the character of the corporate executive; the passenger named Yon-suk.
Right, he is a Korean man.
However, unlike in standard Hollywood genre films, where the foreign antagonist was always flat, monotone, and cartoonishly evil.
They wanted to destroy the world because the script required a bad guy, or they were motivated by some grand, abstract corporate greed that felt entirely disconnected from human reality.
But this executive?
He was terrifying because his actions were entirely, horribly logical, as he didn't want to destroy the train or spread the virus, he simply wanted to go home to his mother.
And to achieve that single, deeply relatable human goal, he was willing to sacrifice every other person in the cabin.
He used a young couple as physical shields, shut the door on a pregnant woman, and turned the panicked, terrified crowd into a mob by weaponizing their collective paranoia.
He was the real monster of the film, not the infected, but the self-preserving rot of the elite in a crisis.
"This guy..." Gavin whispered, his voice trembling slightly as he looked at Regal. "He makes the standard evil scientist or one dimensional villain look completely unwatchable. You gave him so much layered, ugly reality that by the time he gets infected, the audience won't just be cheering for his death. They will be horrified because they will understand exactly how he got there, and how easily they might have made the same choices in his position."
Regal leaned back slightly. "You know what I like most about my scripts?"
Gavin looked up. "What?"
"The villains."
"The villains?"
He tapped the script with one finger. "The infected are a natural disaster. They're like rain or wind.
You don't hate the rain because it gets you wet. You deal with it."
Gavin remained silent. "The real conflict has to come from the choices people make when they're under pressure. Who they become when survival is no longer guaranteed."
Regal's expression hardened. "The divide between those who choose to survive together and those who decide they're better off surviving alone. That's where the real villainy lives."
Gavin slowly closed the white-bound script, the gold embossed title of [Train to Catch].
He stared at the manuscript in silence, his entire understanding of modern blockbuster cinema seeming to shift with every thought that crossed his mind.
"Is it just me..." Gavin muttered, his eyes still fixed on the cover. "...or does this script suit Keanu Reeves?"
Regal was caught off guard by the observation, though he kept his expression composed.
"Why do you say that?" he asked softly. "Their screen presence is quite different, if you ask me."
Gavin shook his head.
"On the surface, maybe. [John Wick] is slick and heavily stylized, while the action here is much rougher and more unhinged. But people tend to forget that John Wick isn't defined by the action. There's a deep sadness underneath him. You see it whenever he thinks about his wife and the life he lost."
He glanced down at the manuscript again.
"I have always thought Keanu could explore that side of himself more. He has this quiet, lonely gravity. He doesn't need to say much for you to feel that something is weighing on him."
Gavin slowly looked back at Regal. "You wrote this with him in mind, didn't you?"
For once, Gavin's intuition had landed exactly where it needed to.
Regal had made a few subtle adjustments to the script specifically with Keanu in mind, but nothing that would turn the character into some exaggerated action icon.
There were no gratuitous hero shots, forced moments of elevation, or attempts to manufacture an aura around him. Regal simply understood what Keanu brought to a role and had shaped certain moments to make use of it.
After all, he had already decided he wanted to make another film with his friend.
Regal didn't confirm or deny Gavin's conclusion.
"The work speaks for itself, Gavin," he said calmly, his voice carrying through the quiet room. "Now go home, get some sleep, and make sure you're at the gate by six tomorrow morning."
Gavin stood up, carefully placing the script back on the desk.
He gave Regal a respectful nod, turned, and exited through the heavy double doors.
Samantha watched the doors click shut before turning to Regal, a mix of amusement and affectionate exhaustion on her face.
"I hate it when your instincts are right." she admitted.
Regal smiled, reaching for his paper cup. "We have a lot of work ahead of us for the announcements, Sam. Let's get to it."
"Are you still planning to release that photo you took?" Samantha asked.
"Yes." Regal confirmed with a sharp, decisive nod.
Gavin looked up. "What?"
"The villains."
"The villains?"
.
….
[To be continued…]
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