"For that to work — for the audience to eventually accept Selene as a protagonist in future films — the film needs to make her comprehensible without making her sympathetic. The distinction matters. Comprehensible means we understand why she does what she does. Sympathetic means we want her to do it. We don't want her to do it. But we need to understand it."
Marvin was quiet for a moment. "The scene after the girl dies."
Christopher waited.
"When Selene looks at Helel. Not the fight. The moment after. That moment. Her expression. The fear in it — not the conventional fear of a fighter encountering something she hasn't seen in a long time."
"She's afraid because she's looking at something she can't explain."
He leaned back.
"Up until then, the world's made sense to her."
"Vampires. Hunters. Rules.
Then Marvin breaks one. "For the first time… ...she doesn't know what she's looking at. If it's played correctly, the audience realises in that moment that Selene is not a simple instrument. She is someone who has been operating within a framework that she suddenly realises may be insufficient. That is the first crack in the wall of what will eventually become her arc."
Christopher slowly nodded.
"That's where the audience starts following her."
"They see the certainty disappear."
"Exactly."
"It's about four lines of screen direction and zero dialogue," Christopher said.
"There shouldn't be."
"It lives or dies on the actress."
"And the camera."
Marvin smiled. "Which is why casting Selene matters more than almost anyone else."
Christopher looked back at the screenplay. "A few pages later… The escape. The candles. The blood. The room." He frowned thoughtfully.
"My first instinct was to push it further."
"Bigger visuals."
"Something unmistakably supernatural. The temptation in production will be to explain that visually. To make it spectacular. To give the audience a demonic image to attach the mystery to."
Marvin shook his head almost immediately. "No."
Christopher looked up.
"I don't think so either."
"The audience shouldn't see a monster. They should see something..." He searched for the right word. "...wrong."
Marvin's expression brightened slightly. "Wrong."
Christopher nodded. "Something that doesn't quite fit. You notice it before you understand it. Like walking into a room and realizing something feels off… ...then five seconds later noticing the picture frame's hanging upside down."
Silence settled over the room.
Marvin reached for his pencil.
"That's the note for the entire film," Marvin said. "Put that in the shooting bible."
Jeff, who had been quietly listening while making notes of his own, looked up.
"'Wrong before spectacular,'" he said, writing it across the top of a fresh page.
"I like that."
"So do I," Marvin said.
Christopher smiled. "I think that's the whole film."
The conversation carried on well into the afternoon. At some point Amy quietly brought in another pot of coffee.
Nobody noticed her leave.
The screenplay remained open between them, its pages now crowded with fresh notes, circles, and hastily scribbled questions. They drifted from story to cinematography, from locations to production design, then back again.
They discussed everything: the details of the script, the atmosphere they wanted to create, the filming itself.
Outside, the afternoon sun had begun to sink, filling the office with the warm, golden light of a California summer.
The folders Jeff had brought that morning—casting lists, department heads, budgets, schedules—had been pushed to one side.
They could wait. This couldn't. Eventually, Marvin opened a drawer in his desk.
He pulled out a thin folder and slid it across the table. Christopher looked down at it.
His name was on the cover. He opened it. The contract wasn't long. He appreciated that.
Too many people in the industry seemed to believe a thicker contract was somehow a better one.
He read every page without speaking.
Jeff watched him over the rim of his coffee mug.
When Christopher finally looked up, the first thing he said wasn't about creative control.
"It says one hundred and sixty thousand."
Marvin nodded. "For directing."
Christopher looked back at the figure. It was... a lot.
Far more than anyone could ever offer him. He had made *Following* with friends, borrowed equipment, and whatever money he could scrape together a few thousand dollars at a time.
Now someone was offering him one 160K dollars to direct a studio film.
For a moment, the number almost felt unreal.
He closed the folder and took a deep breath to calm his heart..
"I appreciate the confidence."
"You've earned it," Marvin said.
Christopher gave a small shake of his head. "I've made one feature."
"And I watched it."
"You also watched a film almost nobody else has seen."
"I did."
Christopher smiled faintly.
"Most people would've called me after the second or third film."
"Most people aren't building a studio from scratch."
That earned a quiet laugh.
Christopher rested a hand on the contract. "I do have one concern."
Marvin waited. "This is your story. Your world. You've lived with it a lot longer than I have. If I take this, I'm directing your vision of your world in your film." He said it without complaint or resentment. But he chose his next words carefully. "I don't want to spend every shooting day wondering whether I'm making the film you imagined. That's a significant constraint for a director. Particularly on a first major production."
"It is," Marvin said. He didn't qualify it.
"Most directors would find that suffocating."
"Some would," Marvin said. "The ones who confuse controlling a process with making a great film. The two are related but not the same." He looked at Christopher directly. "The script is mine. The world is mine. The mythology is mine and I won't compromise any of it. But the way the camera sees it — the decisions about how to photograph Victorian London, how to move through a space, how to make the audience feel the temperature of a room or the weight of a silence — those are yours. Entirely. I'm not a director. I don't want to do your job." A pause. "I want you to do your job. Better than anyone else would do it with this material."
Marvin reached over and tapped the screenplay lying between them.
"I already wrote the film I imagined."
Christopher frowned slightly.
Marvin continued. "Now I need someone who can make people believe it's real."
He met Christopher's eyes. "I didn't offer you this job because I wanted another pair of hands. I offered it because I think you're the best person to direct this script."
Silence settled over the room.
Christopher looked at the screenplay.
Then at the contract.
Then back at Marvin.
It had been a long time since anyone had shown that much faith in him.
"I'll have my solicitor look it over."
"Of course."
Christopher closed the folder.
"But..." A small smile appeared. "I don't think he's going to find much to argue about."
Christopher picked up the screenplay and storyboard from the desk. He looked at it for a moment — the curled edges, the colored tabs, the evidence of three complete readings and whatever number of partial ones the battered state of the binding suggested.
"One last thing."
Marvin looked up.
"The dragon skeleton."
Christopher thought for a second before continuing.
"I don't want it to look dramatic."
"No giant cracks."
"No oversized teeth polished for the camera."
He shook his head.
"It should look like it's been sitting in that museum for a hundred years. Like generations of schoolchildren have walked past it without giving it a second thought. The kind of old that has institutional dust on it, that has been in that building long enough to have a file number and an accession date and a graduate student's unpublished paper written about it." He paused. "I want the audience to feel that this world has always had dragons in it. Not that dragons are a recent discovery."
Marvin nodded. "That's exactly what I want."
He reached into another folder and pulled out a few concept sketches. "The art department's already looking over the creation of it."
Christopher looked through them.
The skeleton dominated the museum's entrance hall, mounted beneath a glass ceiling. Information plaques sat beneath the display. Benches surrounded it. Nothing about the room suggested the extraordinary.
It looked... ordinary.
Christopher smiled. "This is good. If I think of anything else, I'll send the notes over."
"Please do." Marvin welcomed that sort of thing.
Christopher closed the folder and stood.
As he reached the door, another thought stopped him.
"The title."
Marvin waited.
"*Let the Right One In*." Christopher looked back. "It isn't really about Eli."
"No. It's bigger than that." Marvin leaned back in his chair. "Every important moment in the story begins with someone opening a door."
Christopher said nothing.
Marvin continued. "They let someone in."
"A stranger. A secret. Fear. Love. Sometimes all four at once. The title isn't about one person. It's about the choice."
"It's not about any single character," Marvin said. "It's about every choice in the film. Every threshold crossed. Every decision about what to admit and what to keep out." A pause. "Eli lets Helel in. Helel lets Eli in. Selene lets something in when she picks up that sketchbook." Another pause. "The title is a question the film asks about all of them. If they will let The Right One In"
Christopher held his gaze for a moment.
Then he nodded once. "I like that."
"So do I."
Christopher smiled to himself and finally left the office.
The door clicked shut behind him.
For a few seconds, neither of them spoke.
Jeff leaned back in his chair, turning his coffee cup slowly between his hands.
A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"You know..."
Marvin looked up from the stack of folders.
"I've spent a long time in this business."
"I've met plenty of people everyone swore were the future."
He let out a quiet chuckle. "Most of them weren't."
His eyes drifted toward the closed office door.
"I've never met two in the same afternoon."
Marvin only smiled before reaching for the nearest folder.
The smile disappeared as quickly as it had come.
Work again. He flipped it open.
"What's next?"
Jeff glanced at his notebook. "The leading lady."
He slid one of the thicker folders across the desk. "We need to settle Selene."
Marvin rested a hand on the folder without opening it immediately.
"Yes." He looked at Jeff. "Let's find her."
---
Thousands of miles away, in Wellington, Peter Jackson's office erupted into chaos.
The moment Jeff hung up, Peter stared at the phone in disbelief.
Then he laughed.
A loud, almost boyish laugh that echoed through the building.
"They did it."
He looked around the room as though making sure he hadn't imagined the conversation.
"They actually did it!"
He was already halfway out the door.
"Richard!" His voice carried down the hallway. "Jamie! Barrie! Everyone!"
Doors opened.
Heads appeared from workshops and offices.
Richard Taylor arrived first, wiping resin dust from his hands with an old rag.
"What happened?" Peter couldn't stop grinning. "We're making it."
Richard blinked. "...Making what?"
Peter threw both arms into the air. "The Lord of the Rings!"
The room went silent. Then everyone started talking at once.
Richard stepped forward first. "You're serious?"
"I'm completely serious."
"Jeff just called. Marvin approved everything."
Richard stared at him for another second. Then the realization hit.
A grin spread across his face. "You've got to be kidding me."
"I wish I was." Peter laughed again. "We're finally doing it."
He pointed around the room as if assigning jobs on the spot.
"Richard, I need Weta Workshop running flat out. Swords. Armour. Helmets. Miniatures. Everything."
He turned before Richard could answer.
"Jamie, start looking at cameras."
"I want tests."
"Lots of them."
"We're shooting in every kind of weather New Zealand can throw at us."
Another turn. "Barrie… We're going location hunting again. This time for real."
Richard folded his arms. "You've spoken to Marvin about all this?"
Peter nodded immediately. "I've got the authority to put the crew together. He's trusting me to build the production."
His grin widened. "I'm not wasting that."
Richard laughed. "What's the budget?"
"One hundred and twenty million."
A whistle escaped someone at the back of the room.
Peter quickly held up a finger. "For the first film."
"The whole trilogy is expected to run somewhere around two hundred and fifty million."
That stopped even Richard for a moment. "Back-to-back?" he asked.
Peter's hands were already moving, carving shapes out of the air as if he were framing shots. "All of it. Back-to-back. Three bloody films, Richard. All at once."
The workshop fell dead silent. Even the ambient noise of a dozen technicians working in the adjacent rooms seemed to drop away.