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They shot the rescue the next day.

Bebe had rewritten Tull as load-bearing, even though he had less than four minutes of screen time.

Compared to what was about to occur, the lobby and hallway gun battle seemed almost tame. Simply put, Marcel arrives, and the clueless DEA day players are no obstacle in his path to recover the girl. He murders nine agents until he gets to Hollis’s office, only to find that Hollis is elsewhere, trying to find him.

This means Tull is holding the fort.

Tull saves Josie’s life.

He wipes her down.

He gives her hot cocoa.

And he speaks to her in soft tones, arms folded—

—then Josie’s face is suddenly splattered with Tull’s brain, and her faux-father simply announces, “Let’s go home.”

When Hollis returns, and the girl is gone, all he finds is his dead colleagues, his dead mentee, and vengeance itself.

Such was the cycle of karma—a very pretty girl had made a very selfish choice and turned her salvation into an Aristotelian tragedy.

Kel’s close-ups took four takes until Cooper was satisfied.

Eppie and the crew applauded.

Kelvin Grant had pulled through. His final day of filming was done.

On Friday, they shot the most controversial scene in the entire film.

The bed scene.

In this world, the original script never would have been filmed without someone being charged.

Riddled with guilt over Tull’s death and her effective damnation of Marcel to be hunted for the rest of his life, Josie enacts the Macbethian scene of having murdered sleep.

She asks Marcel to sleep with her, just once.

What differentiated Bebe’s script from Vasseur’s was that the physicality was entirely daughterly and fatherly.

It was the confluence of costuming, lighting, and lens choice.

Gone was the tiny singlet; replacing it was the oversized shirt with one shoulder showing. Gone were the revealing shorts, and in came a pair of old pyjamas that hid her legs but not her feet. Gone was the dusky make-up, and in came a plain, natural look that emphasised the door-bruise made by Hollis.

Josie hugs her knees, not a sliver of skin exposed beyond her battered face and her collarbone, and begs for warmth.

“Please don’t leave me alone…” Josie begs.

And Marcel listens.

Yet, he does not slip into bed, as the original script did. He does not allow Josie to snuggle into his arms and coil up against his body.

Instead, Bebe fires the mechanism she has been building for a whole hour, since the second scene of the film, since the first scene they shot with the milk.

For Josie, Marcel breaks his routine.

That was it! That was all that the audience required!

Such was Marcel’s sacrifice, his wordless, parental love for Josie!

He moves the chair he has been sleeping in for twenty years, in the same place, in the same posture, to the bed, beside Josie.

For the sequence, Ferroni had forked out for a studio teacher he did not legally need, because of Eppie’s age, and because he wanted the process documented.

They shot four takes, but Eppie knew the first one had it.

She was coiled in bed, fully covered, her blonde hair all over the pillow. The camera was rigged above them, so that the audience looked down at Luke Fildes’s The Doctor, with Eppie as the child wrapped in her white sheets, while Aubert, in his earth colours, sat beside her, looking up at the ceiling.

When finally he himself was falling asleep, the gun was left on the table. Instead, unconsciously, Marcel’s pistol hand reached across the threshold where the chair met the bed, and placed his hand on Eppie’s warm, exposed ankle, choosing the girl, not the gun.

That was the shot.

And on the close-up, the boom operator came down on his arms, very slowly, until the microphone was a foot above them, because the only sound in the bedroom was their gentle breathing and the building complaining.

“Cut,” said Ferroni. “Alright. Next.”

Even their set teacher was moved to tears.

The scene, four minutes long when cut, had cost less than a single take in the office suite.

The next Monday, they returned to the apartment and shot Mrs Szabo giving away Marcel and Josie’s location to the terrifying DEA man who had abused her in a prior scene.

She had a DEA pamphlet in her pocket, and she had called a hotline and reported the whereabouts of the strange man who lived upstairs, whom she never trusted, despite the man paying every bill and having no maintenance done. She also disliked Josie immensely, because Josie flirted with the man, and young, unattached women were whores.

The siege took the rest of the week.

It was everything in Ferroni’s remaining budget. First thing in the morning, the day players arrived, and the armourer and the costumes pulled up with entire vans’ worth of firearms and armour, joined by four assistants, traffic controllers, and the entire neighbourhood.

The effects man was inside the walls again; the armourer worked three days with a clipboard that never left his hand; the floor smelled of blank smoke and plaster dust as the slate reached scene eighty and beyond.

This commotion, this organised chaos, was the reason why, without the neighbourhood’s explicit consent, without legal, without permits, without Doña Tita’s signatures, there was no filming the bombastic finale.

For Eppie, this involved running from room to room until the final moment, when she was shoved into a garbage chute with the plant, and told to live.

Four floors up, Josie was begging to stay with Marcel.

Four floors down, Hollis was standing at the bottom of a tenement stairwell in a camel coat, eleven men behind him, and looking up into the dark. He was now a fount of blistering, palpable rage.

A group supervisor, nervously, asked if they should send in the backup.

Then Hollis screamed, at the top of a trained voice that had covered theatres seating two thousand souls, with his eyes wide and his expression a mask of unadulterated, unfiltered vengeance.

“Send in EVERYONE!”

The last word came off the tin ceiling and went up four floors and down into the basement while, somewhere above him, Eppie was pushed by her Frenchman into the chute.

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After that, Eppie’s part was done.

She sat in the resting bay and watched the rest of the shoot happen in real time.

Marcel fights his way through the same twenty day-players, dressed to look like police, then SWAT, then DEA, until, finally, in disguise, he is discovered by Hollis.

Hollis takes the stairs alone at the end and finds Marcel bleeding out.

“Don’t you worry, we’ll find your little BITCH,” Hollis giggles, then kicks Marcel over, pulling the pins Marcel had rigged to his shattered hand because he could no longer grip anything.

“Touché…” was Cooper’s final line.

The explosion would be shot elsewhere, by multiple cameras, by a different crew who would construct the frontage, then let it be consumed in a great fireball.

As for the actual tenement, everyone had been evacuated, and the art and pyrotechnics crew had simulated the result of the explosion with practical effects and manufactured smoke.

And in the aftermath, fourteen-year-old Josie, in her ripped jeans and her teal and purple jacket, pot plant in hand, crawls from the garbage room into the side street. She wanders down the block, tear-stained and grieving, for letting hate poison her found paradise.

The same evening, filming at their principal location wrapped.

Ferroni yelled, “Cut!” and Eppie flung herself into his arms, still holding the plant, and the whole block cheered.

Ferroni did not make a speech. He bowed to the residents, still standing outside the still-smoking building entrance.

He thanked Doña Tita by name, in front of everybody, and the applause for the woman, who looked as proud as a peacock, was louder than the applause for the director.

He thanked Aubert, who came back to life, covered in blood.

He thanked Cooper, who shook his hand.

He thanked Eppie, who drew whistles and cheers.

Before he could thank Bebe, someone brought out a boombox, and Kel, who had come to watch, decided to do a little neighbourhood improv with his entourage of cool kids.

Despite the festive atmosphere, Ferroni urged the crew to pack quickly, for though the work was done here—they had another day’s work ahead, and after that—he had yet more work with Norbert in the cutting room.

Such was the life of a director-producer with three houses on the line, and no distributors as of yet.

As for the girl receiving a neighbourhood ovation, he could only thank her from the bottom of his heart.

There was one day left, and it belonged to the epilogue.

Eppie walked down to Mulberry Street in the early cold with a coffee, past the trucks, dazed and amazed at how few days there were left of the shoot.

Incredibly, Aubert had flown out the evening before.

He had been away from home for too long, and he missed his family—dearly.

Once his final scene was done, he held a grand dinner for the core crew, praised Eppie to no end, and promised he’d return for the premiere. Their final moment, as brief as it felt, was him holding her hand and telling her that she would indeed make an amazing daughter, and that he wished her every fortune in the years to come.

She found Joe Mancuso in the makeup chair at half past six with his face half done, telling Linda about how close he was with Alonso Palumbo.

Linda did good work. Her Lorenzo had one eye swollen shut, lip split and shining, and a yellow-green wash across his cheekbone that told of the beating that had happened three days ago. Underneath it, Mancuso was in an excellent mood.

“How do I look?”

“Like you got mauled by a boar,” said Eppie.

“AHAHA,” howled Mancuso, sliding into character. “They come to me first, eh? Hollis, his men, all of them in my backroom. Give us the Pro, they say.” He tapped the swollen eye with one finger, delighted. “I give them niente. That boy is like a son to me.”

“I know… I saw. You were amazing,” Eppie said, humouring the veteran “mobster”.

When Cooper, playing Hollis, had taken a picture from the wall and said, “This your girl? She’s very pretty…” her whole spine had seized up. That’s how good her teacher was at channelling the mannerisms of a [Usurper].

The room they were previously in was now a mess. Hollis and his goons had nearly destroyed the place in a show of force, but they didn’t dare kill Lorenzo, who reasonably still had friends in high places.

The final set piece involved just herself and Mancuso, sitting face to face, the ledger between them.

Josie sits on one side, pot plant in hand, face covered with tears and grime, her hair a Greek tragedy.

“Sit down,” says Lorenzo.

She sits.

He pours her a coffee she is too young for. He does not read the numbers out loud this time, because there is no longer anybody in the room who needs them vocalised.

“Nine years, I kept his books. I ask him every Christmas, Marcel, what will you use it for? When will you retire? He said nothing, until you came in—” Lorenzo stops, and does something with his split lip that is painful. “What did he ask last time? Do you recall?”

Josie’s lips tremble.

Across from Eppie, Camera B was shooting 100mm, straight at her face. To one side, and from above, the gaffer lit and bounced the light so that her eyes caught it, and every bit of moisture was visible.

“School.”

Lorenzo drinks his own coffee with the good side of his mouth. Behind him, shot sharp and wide, the audience sees the communions and the weddings and the boxer and the three popes, and his daughter, beautiful and bright, in school uniform.

“There is a school, up the Hudson. A good one, for music, for theatre, for creating things,” says Lorenzo. “My Angela is there. The girls there wear a beautiful uniform; they learn the piano, the violin, the paintbrush, the stage. I will get you your documents.” He turns the ledger round to face her. There is still a great deal of money left.

He gestures for someone off-screen, and a young Italian day player, dressed in a crisp suit, brings in a set of junior uniforms still in plastic.

“My daughter’s old clothes, never worn. You will go tonight. You will learn, and you will grow up to be a wonderful person, with a wonderful life, and you will not see the likes of me, or Marcel, ever again. The rest of his money is on your card, inside the bag.”

Josie stares. A macro captures the hand holding the houseplant trembling.

“Your father arranged it for you, after your last visit,” Lorenzo concludes without letting her protest. “Now go. Manny will take you this afternoon, before anyone comes asking questions.”

The last thing on the call sheet was a wardrobe fitting for a scene that involved only herself and the rental space of a private school outside the city they had to drive an hour to reach.

Originally, they had sought to skip the scene, but there was space left in the budget, and Juliana Vaughan had made a call to an old friend who absolutely welcomed the singer of Vincent to make use of their spaces.

Her final costume hung on a rail in the second-floor apartment they had been using for wardrobe: a white blouse, a blue-checkered skirt with knife pleats, white ankle socks with a green band, and a pair of Mary Janes on the floor beneath it, all of it new, all of it expensive.

Eppie felt suddenly assailed by déjà vu.

She had worn this, in the same style, in a black box theatre at LAPA, with two hundred people in the dark. She had worn this as The Bride of Death, so that the audience would know about the immutability of God’s law, and the fallacy of human ones.

In the early afternoon, with the sun fomenting wavy mirages on the tarmac, Josie walked out of Lorenzo’s social club in a school uniform, still carrying the plant, and boarded a black SUV waiting outside with the engine running.

Three rented vans, including Eppie’s car, made the hour-long drive out of the city, up the Hudson, to a private boarding school upstate, St. Cecilia’s, run by a colleague of Juliana’s.

Eppie noted that, in Catholicism, St. Cecilia was the patron saint of Music.

For the final scenes, they had only the skeleton crew. Ferroni himself, Delaney on sticks, Andy on lights, Bebe on continuity because there was no one else left, and Linda to touch up her look. Delaney was pulling focus by eye, because he hadn’t missed Eppie in four weeks.

They filmed her in the Headmistress’s office, receiving her room keys and documents.

They filmed her walking with the plant down a long orange corridor, past a gaggle of giggling girls in the distance, too out of focus to require release forms.

They filmed Josie removing the plant from the pot, and replanting it in the garden outside her dorm.

Then came the closing, over-the-shoulder close-up, unique to the revised script: Josie reaching into her uniform and pulling out her bank card.

JOSIE GELASHVILI

Marcel’s last name. Seen once, on a page she couldn’t read.

Delaney retreated, swinging the camera away to reveal Josie walking to the door.

Josie stops at the door for precisely two seconds, all golden in the perishing sun.

She is clean, she is hale, and she is now a student with a future.

“Cut,” said Jack Ferroni, and then nothing else for a moment, because there was nothing after it to call. “Check the gate.”

The five of them stood half-dazed in the afternoon sun, bathed in the warm wind from the Hudson, and watched their young actress step down from the landing.