Don't Call Me Master, Call Me Director

At that moment, the monitor screen happened to capture the scene of someone yelling while riding on the "airplane."

"What is that idiotic knight doing? Didn't I tell him to wear his helmet when filming?"

"Master," Medusa said through the intercom, imitating Lancelot's tone. "That guy seems to be saying, 'To have the King pilot for me, I, an unworthy knight, am truly inexcusable!'"

"...In that case, let that guy fly for a while longer. We'll end it when he finally remembers to wear his helmet."

Shinji gave the ruthless command.

Chapter 55: Grading and Prohibited Words

Half an hour later, Iskandar finally landed his chariot back on the ground.

"Hmm, if this thing were real, it would be pretty cool. I kinda want one."

Iskandar stared intently at the fighter jet model. "We didn't have anything this useful in my era. This is much better than a phalanx formation."

"Impossible, impossible," Waver, who had been forced to fly along, leaned against the side of the chariot and waved his hands repeatedly.

"No individual can afford to operate a modern fighter jet like this. Just the maintenance alone would bankrupt you."

Smack.

Iskandar flicked Waver hard on the forehead.

"What was that for!"

Waver clutched the red mark on his forehead with both hands and complained tearfully.

Iskandar clapped Waver on the shoulder, making it smack repeatedly, and let out a hearty laugh. "Hahahaha! Kid, what nonsense are you spouting! I am a King! When I return to Macedon, I will naturally have an empire!"

"Let's worry about that after you get out of Fuyuki City," Waver retorted grumpily. "What kind of king can't even enter his own territory?"

Iskandar's mouth moved a couple of times. He glanced at Shinji. "As long as I can connect the Ley Lines bit by bit, can't I just follow them to Europe?"

"..."

Waver.JPG, with a look of disgust.

"Yes, that's it!" Iskandar clapped his hand. "Help Master develop his business and push him to connect the world's Ley Lines! This way, the entire world will be the territory of me, King of Conquerors Iskandar!"

"..."

Waver.JPG, with a look of concern for the intellectually challenged.

"Hahahaha! I truly am a Genius!" Iskandar drew his sword, his heart surging with emotion, and shouted. "I've decided! The goal of my expedition this time is set! Conquer the entire world!! Fight my way back to Macedon from the Far East!!"

"So passionate. Global warming is definitely your fault."

Waver.JPG, who had already given up.

Meanwhile, Lancelot was crying as he climbed down from the airplane model.

"I'm truly useless! Because of my mistake, the King had to pilot for me for so long! I am truly an unworthy knight!!"

At this moment, the sorrow on Lancelot's face was so profound it could be used for a cosplay of his colleague, Sadness. Shinji even suspected that if he handed Lancelot a handkerchief, he might bite it and cry.

[Is this what they call the strongest Knight of the Round Table? He seems more like a devoted fanboy.]

Listening to Lancelot's constant mumbling, Shinji felt like kicking him in the backside.

"It's alright, Sir Lancelot."

Artoria, who had gotten off the plane, didn't seem to mind at all. On the contrary, her face had a faint blush of excitement, like a child who had just ridden a roller coaster.

"Although I couldn't control it freely in the air, the feeling of piloting this thing was truly novel," Artoria said, touching the model's exterior.

Lancelot shook his hair. "My King, please don't say that. It's all my fault! I shall atone with my death!"

"Stop spouting nonsense! If you keep this up, I'll have you and Diarmuid go seduce middle-aged and elderly housewives all over Japan."

Shinji swore that if he had known this damned camel had such a personality, he would have summoned Saber Marshal instead.

"Never mind, Master," Artoria said, waving her hand to dissuade him. "I believe Sir Lancelot didn't do it on purpose. You should be more forgiving."

Shinji shook his head helplessly. He was thinking further ahead.

If the relatively normal Lancelot was like this, what kind of strange creatures would the other Knights of the Round Table be? Shinji felt he could imagine it without even thinking.

"Artoria, I've realized you have quite a tough job, leading so many problem children alone... What are you doing?"

Shinji turned his head and found Artoria unfastening the stand of the fighter jet model.

Artoria smiled and said, "Master, I'm planning to take this child for a spin."

"This thing can't even be driven on the road! Do you want to get impounded by the traffic police?" Shinji's mouth twitched violently.

Although Japan's regulations for modified cars were relatively lenient, a motorcycle modified into a fighter jet like this would not be allowed on the road in any country with a sound legal system.

Not to mention that it was loaded with live ammunition (of the Magecraft type)!

Was this Lady King of Knights planning to start an Anglo-Japanese War?

"Artoria, if you really want to ride a motorcycle, I think the one you rode in the movie was pretty good..."

"Hey, Master. What do you think of Lamure II?"

"Don't give it a name!"

Shinji smacked Artoria on the head.

In the end, Artoria never got to fulfill her dream of taking "Lamure II" out for a spin.

As for the final disposition of the fighter jet model, Shinji planned to remove unnecessary parts after filming and then auction it off as a movie prop.

Even though the model was expensive, there were plenty of bored rich people in this world, and Shinji estimated the final auction price would far exceed the production cost.

Of course, this was also thanks to the skillful Touko, senpai. It would be difficult for anyone else to create such a realistic prop quickly and well.

Currently, Shinji had completely delegated the prop-making matters to Touko. He only needed to state his requirements and wait for Touko to deliver.

Leave professional matters to professionals.

People like Touko were what you called professionals.

To get professional help from professionals, Shinji didn't mind cooperating with certain "bad guys."

For example, to obtain the rating standards from Europe and America, Shinji had to request the Jidai Group to send a consultant to assist with the filming of FZ.

Even though Shinji had removed the "child-related" content from the script, the rating standards for the European and American markets were far more complex than a simple cutoff.

For instance, there were strict standards for the amount of blood shown in a shot: how much red counted as PG-13, and how much counted as R-rated.

Sometimes, Shinji felt the amount of blood was fine, but the Jidai Group's consultant would say no, because the impact was on a vital area and couldn't cause bleeding.

FZ hadn't encountered this problem before because Shinji had avoided having characters bleed to make it easier to pass the review; characters usually just had a bit of makeup for bruises.

Even for shots where Shirou was seriously injured and near death, Shinji used lighting and camera angles to imply the situation, leaving room for the audience's imagination.

But FZ couldn't do that this time. To depict the cruelty of war, blood in the shots was essential, making censorship a troublesome part of the filmmaking process.

It had to be said, the review standards in Europe and America were truly annoying.

Despite the good publicity, the review line in Europe and America was "what is not forbidden is permitted." You could film whatever you wanted, and no one would stop you.

However, when you needed to bring your work to market, you had to accept the review of industry associations.

It wasn't impossible to skip the review, but no cinema would agree to show a film without these certifications in their theater.

As for the film association's review standards, they were as flexible as Sir Humphrey's moral bottom line.

For internal convenience, the PMAA (Motion Picture Association of America) published very vague review standards. Besides the universally known taboos, only internal staff truly understood the specifics.

It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that if a novice who knew nothing made a film, their work could inexplicably become an R-18 movie.

It wasn't that they filmed anything excessively explicit, but rather that they inadvertently violated some subtle review details.

Of course, if that novice was like a certain bored Englishman filming "Drying Paint," that would be a different story.

Compared to Shinji, a novice, the Jidai Group's consultant, who specialized in dealing with censorship, was clearly more professional.

In addition to visual review, they also helped redesign the dialogue for various characters, avoiding many words that could touch upon rating restrictions.

Besides potentially discriminatory language, the consultant also focused on censoring profanity in the character scripts.

When it came to profanity in English films, many people's first thought was a certain word starting with "F."

But in reality, English has many swear words, and different words correspond to different ratings. Even the same word could have completely different rating standards depending on the context or usage.

For example, the word "dick" is not taboo when used as a person's name. Once it's used to refer to a certain organ, it becomes taboo. However, the derived meaning of "jerk" is not taboo.

Thus, in the sentence "Dick's dick is dick," although "dick" appears three times, only the second instance crosses the review line.

More importantly, due to social trends and the interests of film companies, the review standards varied greatly across different periods.

Take the word "dick" again. Before the 1980s, when used to refer to a certain organ, it was merely slang used privately among a small group of women, similar to how people online now use "Liu Bei" to refer to inappropriate books.

After Richard Nixon, known as "Tricky Dick," came to power, and because this old schemer was so disliked, the word "dick" was widely misused by major European media (dick being a nickname for Richard Nixon).

After the Watergate scandal broke, even Americans began to overuse the word, eventually leading to "dick" being classified as a taboo word by the media.

And since then, no one has chosen "Dick" as a name. Nowadays, any European or American named Dick is at least 40 years old, an old white man.

Although the above is an extreme example, the complex and constantly changing review standards indeed gave Shinji a headache.

Just for the review of word usage, Shinji felt that hiring the Jidai Group's consultant was worthwhile.

However, no matter how clever the dialogue, it was just words. As long as the words were replaced, they could pass the review.

But the scenes where Ryunosuke Uryu and the Marshal killed people were more difficult to handle. Even if there wasn't a drop of red in the shot, the scene was definitely not something that could be shown to children with a PG-13 rating.

However, some things that cannot be directly shown through the camera lens can be conveyed through another method to allow the audience to imagine.

Just like how Shinji handled the shot in FSN where Shirou was almost cut in half by Uncle Hai, by using items in Ryunosuke's den, his own list, and one or two murders that were on the borderline of censorship, he could achieve the goal of showing the character's cruelty.

Even if the visible scale of these scenes had a bottom line, the "blank spaces" outside the frame could definitely make the audience shudder.

As for whether the audience would have nightmares because of it, Second Master believed it was highly unlikely.

The movie fans in this world, under the "artistic" influence, were already battle-hardened and experienced.

If it weren't for the rating considerations, and Shinji had actually filmed it as R-rated, it would only have made the gorehounds exclaim "delicious."

After finishing the aerial combat shots, Shinji once again led the film crew to the studio.

Shinji had previously halted studio filming to allow the set design team to re-dress the sets, and now that the scene was ready, he naturally returned.

The film set inside the studio had already been decorated to resemble a building's rooftop, the location for Matou Kariya and Tokiomi Tohsaka's battle.

Chapter 56: Kariya: Tokiomi, this thing is more useful than a magic wand.

Rooftops have always been a magical place in literature.

Even though most rooftops in the real world are locked, making them inaccessible to ordinary people.

But the protagonists in stories always find various ways to get onto rooftops.

This is because building rooftops possess the attribute of being isolated islands within bustling city centers in stories. Despite the busy streets below, the rooftop itself is very peaceful.

For creators, this is a scene with a strong environmental contrast, a natural hiding place for protagonists to secretly do something.

Therefore, we see Heroic Spirits battling on rooftops, Mages battling on rooftops, and Makoto-bro battling on rooftops.

Ahem, the last one doesn't count.

On the studio set, the rooftop had been constructed, and the film crew was making final preparations for filming.

Shinji would certainly not take the film crew to a real high-rise rooftop; the wind there was too strong, and the footage would be terrible.

Kariya, already in makeup, walked down from the makeup trailer. Even without the setting of worms inside his body, Kariya, with his dry hair and pale complexion, looked no different from his appearance in FZ – equally amiable, guaranteed to scare children to tears.

"I think Shinji, you have a misunderstanding of the word 'amiable'," Kariya complained to his nephew. "Or perhaps you, who doesn't even have a high school diploma, can't even speak Japanese?"

Shinji responded in a sing-song voice, "This is called sarcasm, my dear uncle. Your Japanese was taught by a gym teacher."

Kariya got goosebumps from Shinji's words, rubbing his arms. "If you speak in that translated voice again, I'll throw the old man's collection into your bed!"

As it turned out, Shinji had already walked off to discuss shooting angles with the photographer, rendering Kariya's threat pointless.

"Tsk."

Kariya clicked his tongue, a wicked smile forming on his face. "Shinji, just you wait. You'll have your comeuppance during filming later."