….
[I Want To Eat Your Pancreas] Release Day.
….
Noel, the film student, bought the tickets three weeks in advance.
Surely, it was because they would sell out… but it actually had to be more because of his pure love and admiration for Regal's films.
It was his way to display his commitment as a fan to Regal. A promise to the film before you have seen a single frame of trailer: I am showing up. I will be there. First day, first show.
He texted Laurence, his film school friend, the confirmation screenshot.
Laurence replied eleven minutes later: ["Awesome!"]
Noel: ["Yep. But my sister won't be coming. She was creeped out by the film's name."]
Laurence: ["...understandable…"]
Noel: ["Leave it. It's her LOSS!"]
Laurence: ["Obviously."]
That was the entire conversation.
Three weeks before the film, and neither of them needed to say anything else. They had been doing this for more than five years now.
All that remained was showing up.
….
Noel and Laurence had been friends for six years, and had similar goals of preserving filmmaking.
Which meant they had been friends for more than a quarter of their lives.
It often felt like a lot, and at the same time felt like nothing.
They are just college sophomores - nineteen, twenty - the start of adulthood, and it is also that age where they are old enough to harbor loud opinions, but young enough that those opinions are still mostly translucent.
Back then, their relationship with cinema was purely recreational. They consumed movies the way most teenagers do: as a way to kill two hours and give you something to talk about after.
And talking about movies, back then, meant a very specific kind of conversation. Surface-level, and nothing too particle.
"That actor was great.""Yeah, and the elevation scene? Awesome.""The twist at the end though.""Didn't see it coming."
That was the vocabulary: Actor. Scene. Twist.
The kind of words that sit on top of a film without ever sinking into it.
They didn't know any better.
Movies were simply meals - enjoyable in the moment, but forgotten by breakfast.
Everything shifted on a particular and random 'Tuesday' of a film release:
June 16th, 2010.
It was almost six years ago.
They were ditching school on a grey boredom of a Tuesday afternoon and the mutual understanding that whatever was happening in third-period geography was less interesting than whatever was happening literally anywhere else.
They walked randomly without any plan.
Just two teenagers drifting through a city that was slightly too warm, past shops they couldn't afford and cafés they were too young to sit in without feeling like impostors.
Eventually, they ended up outside a cinema.
Small one, and obviously not a multiplex - one of those older, single-screen places that wasn't furnished in recent times.
The film playing was called:
[Following]
Obviously, neither of them have any slightest idea of what the film is about, or even heard of it.
The poster was slightly unique, but showed them nothing grabbing. There were no recognizable stars on the poster, or franchise branding, and no "From the visionary director of..." taglines.
To Noel and Laurence, it appeared to be a film made by nobodies, starring nobodies, about a subject that remained stubbornly opaque.
Nevertheless, since they had nothing to do, they bought tickets just for the heck of it.
Why not?
Zero expectations - Absolute zero.
The kind of blank-slate viewing experience that you can never, ever replicate once you know what you are walking into.
Then, the film started.
And something happened.
It wasn't instant, like a lightning bolt or a revelation or any of the dramatic things people say when they describe the moment they fell in love with an art form.
It was slower and quieter, gradual gravitational pull - Without realizing it, they began leaning forward, their breathing unconsciously syncing with the rhythm of the cuts.
Because for the first time, they noticed the rhythm.
The camera wasn't merely observing; it was choosing.
It was a series of deliberate provocations - deciding what to show, what to withhold, and exactly when to pivot.
Certain shots lingered a beat longer than felt comfortable, creating a pressurized curiosity, like standing before a door left slightly ajar.
At that time, Noel didn't have words for this at the time, and neither did Laurence.
They didn't know what a 'shot' was in the technical sense or what 'taking' meant.
They had never thought about a screenplay as a thing that existed separately from the finished film - a document, a blueprint, a set of decisions made by a person before a single camera was turned on.
But they felt it.
The craft.
They felt the presence of a mind behind the images.
And it was intentionality so precise it felt like a different medium entirely from the 'point-and-shoot' movies they had consumed their whole lives.
The film ended.
They sat through the credits.
It wasn't because they were being respectful - they didn't know yet that sitting through credits was a thing film people did.
They sat because neither of them was ready to move. The experience was still settling.
…and it was also the day that they discovered the post credit scene.
….and it was also the day they stopped being the first person to leave the theatre hall.
They walked out into the afternoon, squinting in the sunlight.
Not talking yet, and then they started talking.
And for the first time - the very first time - the conversation wasn't about the actor or the twist or the 'awesome scene.'
It was about the shots and the - 'man behind the camera' - they never recognised it until now.
Throughout their discussion, they were using the wrong term for every practical description.
They didn't know the terminology, but they were reaching for the right ideas.
Groping in the dark for concepts they didn't have names for yet - and finding them anyway, through sheer instinct and the desperate need to articulate something that had just happened to them that they didn't fully understand.
That conversation lasted four hours. They missed the rest of school, but it didn't matter.
Every crude attempt at analysis, every vocabulary-less insight, pointed toward a single, haunting question:
Who made this?
….
The answer was a twenty-three-year-old dropout film school student named:
Regal Seraphsail.
He is 23?
They weren't aware how uncanny it was for Hollywood, but for teenagers he was just a 'proper adult' doing his job.
It wasn't until years later, after they had mapped the landscape of Hollywood's elite, that they truly grasped the impossibility of what he had achieved.
Only then they realised what kind of anomaly Regal was.
And not just that.
The more they learned about him, the more the story didn't make sense.
His origin.
Everything about the production was lean and improbable: a microscopic budget, a skeleton crew, and a cast of complete unknowns. Yet, the final product possessed the quality of a million-dollar studio project.
The most staggering detail?
Regal even bet all the money he earned from his that time debutant book [Harry Potter] on it.
He hadn't just written and directed it; he was his own cinematographer, his own financier, and his own safety net.
For Noel and Laurence, discovering that the filmmaker - Regal - was the same author - LIE120 - they had been following online for months felt like a glitch in reality.
Was that not enough for them to admire the man?
It was more than enough.
He wrote web novels, built a readership, translated that readership into a published book, and used the funds from the book - his own funds, with no studio, investors, or a safety net - to produce a film.
Cast it. Directed it. Got it released.
And made it successful.
Just like that.
Step by step by step. As if the path from "kid writing stories online" to "filmmaker with a theatrical release" was a staircase that anyone could climb if they simply refused to stop walking.
From that moment on, they became disciples of his career.
Every release and project, they watched Regal grow in real time - watched the budgets increase, ambition expand, and craft deepen.
They watched the industry start paying attention to a man it had initially ignored.
And something happened to them in the process.
The interest didn't stay casual.
Once you have seen the machinery behind a film and understand that a movie is the result of ten thousand deliberate, human choices:
You can't un-see it.
Every film they watched after [Following] was in contrast to how they used to watch.
They started noticing things.
The angle of a shot, placement of an actor within the frame and the moment a cut happened and why it happened there and not two seconds earlier.
They started reading about filmmaking - not assigned reading, school material, just two teenagers pulling books out of libraries and watching MeTube breakdowns and arguing with each other about lens choices in films they'd seen three times.
It grew, and grew.
And by the time school ended and the question of what next arrived, the answer was already there.
Had been there for a while. Just waiting for them to say it out loud.
Film school.
It wasn't that they expected the path to be easy, or that they harbored the delusion of becoming the next Regal.
It was simply that the alternative - doing something else, spending their lives in a field that wasn't this - had become unthinkable.
The door that [Following] had cracked open could no longer be shut; they had stepped through, and they lived on the other side now.
And this wasn't just their story.
Noel often reflected on this while sitting in crowded lecture halls.
He looked at the bunch of students around him and realized he was surrounded by versions of his own origin story.
Different favorite films, and moments of realization. But the structure was the same: someone saw something that Regal made, and it rearranged something inside them, and now they were here.
Regal Seraphsail hadn't just made movies.
He had triggered a tidal wave - inspired a generation of young creatives to believe, for the first time:
I could do that, not easily and definitely not tomorrow. But eventually, because he did, and he started from nothing.
It was a massive shift that neither the industry nor Regal himself had fully quantified yet.
But it was there.
In the enrollment numbers at film schools.
In the spike of independent short films being submitted to festivals. In the thousands of teenagers writing screenplays in notebooks during classes they should have been paying attention to.
And it all traced back to a dropout who started with a web novel because he had a story that couldn't wait.
….
Now, it was opening day for his latest project.
A romance.
If it was another director with this filmography even the duo would have laughed it off.
And again, the title [I Want to Eat Your Pancreas]?
Heck no.
But–
It's from Regal?
Sign them up. They are in.
They are already in front of the theatre.
….
Even Noel - who had trained himself over two years of film school to evaluate a project on its merits before judging its packaging - had to admit the title was genuinely strange.
It seemed both commercially and strategically wrong for a romance oriented film.
Also Regal hadn't done romance before. Indeed there were movements of it, but they were never the central focus.
There were romantic elements in his other films - subplots, undertones, moments between characters that carried an emotional charge - but he had never built an entire film around it.
And it was a high school romance at that.
Which was a genre so saturated, so strip-mined of originality, that making a good one required either extraordinary craft or extraordinary stupidity.
Noel was betting on the former.
They hadn't watched the trailer.
In fact they mostly avoided Regal trailers.
Honestly, even as die-hard defenders, they had to admit that Regal…. had a notorious reputation for revealing too much in his marketing.
It was the one criticism they couldn't argue against.
Noel and Laurence didn't want to know the tone going in. They wanted the film to set its own temperature.
So all they had was the title. And six years of trust built on seven previous first-day, first-show screenings, every single one of which had earned the trust placed in it.
Thirteen films now - excluding this one.
[Following], [Death Note], [The Hangover], [Whiplash], [Iron Man: 1] [Spider-Man: Web of Destiny], [Superman: Man of Tomorrow], [The Matrix], [Deadpool].
And the [Harry Potter] Film Franchise: [Philosopher's Stone], [Chamber of Secrets], [Prisoner of Azkaban], [Goblet of Fire].
Total of seven directorial ventures and six as writer.
A total of twelve times sitting in the dark, giving the screen their full attention, holding everything they wanted to say until the lights came up.
….
.
[To be continued…]
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