Salma had already checked out earlier that morning, which told him plainly enough how she viewed what had happened between them—a temporary release contained to one night, nothing more complicated than that.
He understood it the exact same way.
There was no room for sentimentality here.
Everything he possessed right now rested entirely on his identity as a bankable director.
If that reputation ever cracked, the access and the attention that came with it would disappear just as fast.
For now, he had to be ruthless with his focus.
The last thing he needed was his name attached to tabloid gossip instead of the work.
Dean walked him straight into New Line’s editing bays.
The editor waiting for them was a tall, gaunt man named Tyne, whose pale, uneasy demeanor suggested he had chosen a profession in a dark room precisely to avoid having to talk to people.
After a brief, one-sided attempt at small talk, Adam gave up trying to draw him out and let the footage speak instead.
Adam had braced himself for a turf war—editors of Tyne’s tenure usually carried real authority in these rooms—but Tyne turned out to be surprisingly cooperative.
He pulled selections and executed cuts without questioning Adam’s logic once.
Adam appreciated it more than he could say.
He already had the exact rhythm of Saw mapped out in his head; he didn’t want a collaborator to debate him, he just needed a technician to follow his lead.
Day one turned into day two, and day two blurred into a punishing eight-day sprint.
Adam practically lived in the editing bay.
It was one of the few rooms in the building with a cot, and he used it more nights than not, surviving on studio-provided catering and sheer adrenaline.
Working from the structure he remembered and adjusting a handful of narrative flaws he recalled audiences complaining about in his past life, he shaped the raw footage into its final form.
Eight days after he had walked in, his first real film existed—a tightly wound, $1.3 million horror picture.
He left the editing room, found a nearby hotel, ate an actual meal, and slept for a full twenty-four hours.
The next morning, Adam and Dean carried the finished print into New Line’s internal screening room.
They were met by Shay, the president of New Line Cinema.
He was a sharp-eyed executive who currently wore a remarkably friendly smile, though Adam knew enough about studio politics to know that warmth was entirely conditional on box office returns.
The moment Adam ceased being profitable, he would be discarded.
“Dean’s been talking about you nonstop,” Shay said, shaking Adam’s hand with practiced warmth.
“He told me he hasn’t seen a director with this much inspiration in years.
The second I heard you’d locked the cut, I had to see it for myself.”
Shay led them, along with Derek—who had just arrived—into the studio’s small private theater.
It was built for exactly one purpose: letting the studio’s own people evaluate an unreleased film and determine how much promotional funding it actually deserved.
A handful of staff were already seated when they walked in.
“Internal screeners,” Shay explained softly, gesturing at the room.
“Good instincts, every one of them.
They analyze a film from a dozen different angles and tell us whether it has the legs for a real theatrical push.”
Adam nodded.
People like this were the quiet foundation of any successful studio, the ones who spotted a cultural shift before the rest of the industry caught up.
He knew New Line was on the verge of a massive ascendance; years from now, The Lord of the Rings would turn this company into an absolute titan.
But he also knew the ending to that story—how their subsequent superstition about fantasy epics would lead them to over-leverage themselves on The Golden Compass, completely losing their independence and forcing a corporate merger into Warner Bros.
Adam shook off the thought of the studio’s distant future and handed the film reel to the projectionist.
The lights dropped.
The film began.
The opening played out exactly as Adam intended.
The male protagonist—also named Adam—wakes up in a flooded bathtub.
The room around him is a dilapidated, subterranean nightmare.
His foot is chained to a corroded pipe.
Across the room, another man, Gordon, is chained the exact same way.
Between them lies a corpse in a pool of blood.
Dean and Shay both nodded slightly in the dark.
It was the reaction of executives who read a room’s interest in real time.
The opening hooked them instantly: Who had kidnapped these men, and why?
The film moved relentlessly forward.
The impossible choices forced on the victims, the slow unraveling of the game.
It escalated until the climax, where a desperate Gordon sawed through his own foot, dragging his severed leg out the door to find help.
The character Adam, left behind in the room, watched in absolute horror as the “corpse” on the floor slowly rose to its feet.
The character lunged at Jigsaw, only to be neutralized by a pre-planned electric shock.
Jigsaw walked calmly toward the heavy iron door, delivering his final, chilling line: “Most people are so ungrateful to be alive.
But not anymore.”
The screen went black.
A scream cut through the darkness.
The film ended.
For a moment, the silence in the room was absolute.
“My God,” one of the screeners finally exhaled, entirely captivated.
“Is he supposed to be some kind of god in this thing?”
It wasn’t sarcasm.
In all his years doing this job, the screener hadn’t seen a villain pull an audience in quite like this—a man acting as an agent of some twisted divine judgment, punishing those who didn’t value life.
It gave the film a profound, almost religious weight that standard horror movies never even attempted to reach.
“The cinematography is excellent,” another added quickly.
“Nothing distracting.
It moves fluidly.”
“The plot’s got a couple of soft spots,” a third said, leaning forward, “but none of it matters next to Jigsaw’s personal charm.
Where did you even find this actor, Director Cole?
He’s got this calm, almost gentle face the entire time—it shouldn’t work for a serial killer, but paired with what he’s doing, it makes everything feel terrifyingly logical.”
One by one, the screeners echoed the same sentiment.
By the time the lights came back up, there was a quiet, near-unanimous agreement in the room.
They weren’t just looking at a profitable movie; they were looking at a monument in the genre.