How Primetime Screenwriter Ajon Singh Got His Script to Robert Pattinson

This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free.Fall movie season is officially here, kicking off last week with 2026 MVP Robert Pattinson’s instant meme-generator of a performance in Primetime, where he plays a dramatized version of NBC correspondent Chris Hansen circa 2006, during peak To Catch a Predator mania. The film is less of a biopic than a heightened satire that eventually escalates into a full-blown nightmare. It’s a fun time, and I had even more fun talking to screenwriter Ajon Singh at the after-party that followed the film’s LA premiere, so much so that I told him it’d be malpractice if we didn’t continue our conversation on the record for this very column. So here it is: Ajon and I talking about how this script went from agent’s dustbins to Pattinson’s desk, and how The Odyssey star’s off-kilter on-set improvisations led to some of the Primetime’s many golden moments.The film’s been out for a week now. How has the reception been?The reception has been really great, overwhelmingly just so supportive. It has been weird, though. We looked at the statistics and it was 69% Gen Z, and we were really shocked by that because a lot of the symbolism is obviously pretty millennial, mid-aughts stuff. It almost feels like this weird telepathic nostalgia that we're sharing with different generations. But people have been so nice and even some of the shocking messages have been very creative, so I've been enjoying that.What kind of shocking messages?Well, one of the main things that really surprised me was Chris Hansen did that press conference after watching the movie and on three separate occasions he said, "Go watch the film." It was an endorsement in a way. Someone sent me a Cameo he did where he says, "Just know that this film is a dramatic work, but there are worse things than having Robert Pattinson play you." It feels like we're in some sort of embittered relationship or something.The video Chris did coming out of the Regal Times Square is incredible.Yes. Yes. Yes. That was great too because, to his credit, he did include people who were like, "I liked it. I don't think it made you look that villainous, honestly." I didn't expect him to include stuff like that.My experience watching it was that I could see both sides. If I'm Chris Hansen, I might feel a way about this. But then also, the way that the script and the movie unfold, it's very heightened. It's not a straight biopic. There's a level of creative license and dramatization to it that I feel like you could easily detach from if you're him.We talked a lot, Lance and I, about how we didn't want to make a conventional biopic. I did a lot of research before I ever even met Lance and then Lance did his own unearthing of all of these things, and then we would trade documents. Rob had his own process of an immense amount of research. Only once we did all of that fact-finding did we then decide how much to dramatize. We wanted to make it this sort of surrealist picture and I think we successfully did that. I can get on my soapbox about this particular issue—we never set out to villainize Chris Hansen.The exact reasons people are arguing in the comments about this movie is the way we’d talk to each other, but we never really wanted to moralize about the film. We wanted to be like, “Hey, this was a really strange moment in time.” For Lance and I, it was an extremely formative time. I was 9 or 10 years old. We were extremely impressionable. We're consuming everything on television, Jerry Springer, Oprah, To Catch a Predator, 20/20. Apple Jacks commercials. Every single piece of branding, commercialism, capitalism just absolutely drilling itself through your skull. The script is an exorcism, in a way, of all of these things from my body.I was going to ask about your 2006 pop culture diet but I find it interesting that you named-checked a lot of branding and commercial stuff. At the party, there was a prop of Jeff Zucker’s TV schedule board, and I'm looking at it like, “Man, this was a golden era for TV.” You got prime Lost, The OC was up there, Smallville and Supernatural if you want good WB schlock.That was a big part of the science of writing this movie too, figuring out where it fits. We have Joey on the board there and people pointed out to us that Joey was already off the air at this point. But Lance and I were just like, "It's so funny to have Joey on the board, so we'll just take that one on the chin."But yeah, you're right, it was this golden era. But also, it was a sort of terrifying period where media is transitioning out of the Seinfeld era, the Friends era, these network TV juggernauts, and people were trying to figure out what the next iteration of that looks like. And in a way, reality TV existed but I think To Catch a Predator was truly the beautiful amalgamation hybrid between scripted and non-scripted, and that's echoed throughout the next decade until even now. I think it's profoundly impactful, whether people like it or not.Tell me about the journey from script to screen. At first, nobody wanted to touch it, is that right?Yeah, exactly. I've been doing this for enough time at this point where I have a sense for when I write something that's bad. I don't know if I've written something that's good, but I can tell whether something is bad or not bad. And I had a confidence with this script that is usually dangerous. But we took it to the marketplace and nobody would even read it. That was the real sad part. I was like, "Read it and then pass—that's closure. If you don't read it, I never even had a shot." That was heartbreaking. Then I get a call from Will [Iannaccone] saying, "I don't know how this happened but Robert Pattinson read the script and he wants to meet you."I was like, "How the fuck did Robert Pattinson get the script? We can't even get another producer on this movie." It was so far-fetched. Apparently, he and Brighton, his producing partner, got it at a party and then later on they reached out to me. So we all hopped on a Zoom and they just got it. It was one of the most validating moments of my whole career.A big part of the reason I think I'm even still standing is that I am a naturally delusional person. During that Zoom, I'm weirdly not even nervous because I can't even process that it's even happening.You're just disassociating, almost.Yeah I'm, like, "Look, Rob, I know you're busy, but if you were ever considering acting in this movie, I think we could do something really special." And he said, "I'd be lying if I said I didn't imagine myself in this role… But I would never do it. I want to produce it."From that point, while we're sorting all that out, Robert has a birthday party which I'm not invited to [Laughs]. And at this birthday party, the director Lance Oppenheim is there. And apparently at this party, they're having a good time and Brighton and Rob bring the script on a phone to Lance and Lance starts reading it at this party and then goes to his car and continues reading it.The next morning, he sends me this beautiful email. It was probably the most effusive email I've ever received in my life. And I was like, “Wow, this is so nice. Who is Lance Oppenheim?” But he linked [his work] and I watched it and thought, This is the best working director in the business. I felt such a spiritual connection to his work. Not to mention when I watched Spermworld on Hulu, I swear to God, two bars came down, and they were advertisements for Chris Hansen's TruBlu online network. I don't know if my phone is feeding information to the TV but I choose to believe that it's something bigger than that.So I was taken by him and we had lunch and it was amazing. We were preparing to go out to arguably bigger, commercial, more bankable directors. But the second we brought Lance on, A24 gave us a financing deal to go make the movie because they had apparently been chasing him to do a scripted film and he kept passing. The project essentially went from being totally dead to having a financing deal in a period of two-and-a-half weeks.This is over two-and-a-half weeks? Wow.And we had no lead. And that's when we had this fateful dinner at Rob's house. We're up until 1:00 AM, drinking wine. Over the course of the night, I pretend to go to the bathroom. I'm writing notes on my phone because he's talking about the character. But the way he talks about it, he talks about it like someone else is going to play it. He talked about how he would run around the Silver Lake Reservoir listening to Chris Hansen's podcast and he was reciting lines from the script. I left that dinner and I said to Lance, "I think he's going to do it." And over the next five days, I worked harder than I probably ever have—Lance and I put our heads together, came up with a game plan, and over five days I rewrote the entire character for the way Rob saw it, which was not in any way philosophically opposed to the way I saw it, actually. I would say the original version of the script was more of a political thriller, and what Rob brought to the script was this mystical angels and demons sort of element. So I understood how to work it in. Opportunities like this don't really come across your lap many times, so I rewrote the character in five days and we sent the script back to Rob and we were like, "Here's the version. If you don't like it, we'll go fuck ourselves. But this is the version we think that you could act in." And he took the weekend and he got back to us and he said, "Let's do it."We’ve all been talking up Rob's 2026 and how dynamic his performances are, but it sounds like he's underrated as a producer.For one, Lance and his girlfriend got pregnant unexpectedly two weeks into me knowing him. Selfishly, I'm like, "Dude, what are you doing?" This is his big break in scripted. It's my big break in ever. I was like, "You can't have a baby." But he had a healthy baby five days before we started principal photography on the film, which I'm sure was way crazier for him, but it was crazy for me. And Rob, through that entire process, was so involved creatively. He was doing Die My Love and The Drama. And every single thing he brought to the table was incredibly artistically challenging, which is a good thing.Through the depths of winter, we were all living in New York during pre-production, and me, Rob, and Lance would basically hide out in this office in Dumbo, working every single night until 3:00 AM beating out these scenes, stress-testing them, inverting them, seeing which ways Rob could perform it. You do all of this work but when you get to set, Rob stops—he doesn't talk about it anymore and you don't really know what's happening or how he's going to play it. And we all watched him do this profoundly interesting version of this character that I could have never even imagined even though I spent all this time working with him. He would do eight takes and every single one of them could have been a different version of this movie, and they would've all been fantastic. It was really up to Lance and our editor, Dan Garber.At the party you told me the phone call in act three, when he does the finger point, was day two of shooting and he made that motion up on the spot. You guys were like, What the fuck?He found a way to take three lines and really make a meal out of them. The term Rob always used when we talked about the third act is he wanted to feel like a “weakened lizard.” You can see it in the precinct, he's stumbling, Decoy Dan says his line and then there's this silence and we're all like, What is Rob going to do? We were so nervous. He’s stumbling over, Dan continues to talk and then Rob just looks at him, and he takes his hand like this and it's really slow, and he points and he goes, "Cock."To Rob's credit, I think we were all like, "That doesn't make any sense. Why would he do that?" I remember us finding it funny but we're like, "Obviously, we're not using that." And then when Lance went into the edit with Dan it was like, "Oh, that’s genius." Watching it chronologically, somehow Rob had foreseen how he was going to play the character in a way that we couldn't. When we got to that point in the movie, it just felt right.I feel like his performance centers in your script and Lance’s film as being this heightened dark comedy with some heavy surrealism. I’ve seen you and Lance describe it elsewhere as a “fever dream,” especially in the third act.We looked at movies like Jacob's Ladder and Sexy Beast and movies that also have a strong sense of color. There was a line literally in the script where I wrote: “from this moment on, the literal film is microwaved.” It feels like we're being microwaved so the colors start bleeding, we start feeling sticky like we're swimming through syrup. We always talked about the third act especially being extremely disorienting, but it should fly.My vision for this film was always consistent. These people are on the cusp of something great and they're a fingertip away from getting that thing, and it should be fucking screaming like a missile as they approach that thing. And the second they arrive, Bill Conradt shoots himself in the head and it's silent for the first time in the whole movie.The other way we also talked about it was that it's Moby Dick. Ahab has the spear. Lance and I would always talk about it as if you throw the spear and it's flying through the air and then it misses and then the movie ends. That would be so thrilling and so bizarre. Because you're expecting him to get the guy. And the whole movie is about this—it's about chasing your dreams, to put in very Hollywood terms. It's about Decoy Dan chasing his dreams and it's not what he thought it would be. It's about Chris trying to prove himself as a journalist but then he undergoes this metamorphosis where he's like, "It's not about this petty pursuit of primetime, I have to vanquish evil. That's how I will fix all things, whether it's in my life or in the world or in my past or in my brain." But on some level, I think I went through that. I struggled for years and I wanted this thing so bad. To my earlier point, I had this delusion that it would always work out. And now that this movie has had such a positive reception, I am the most nauseated. “Nauseated” isn't the right word but it's like I'm the most—Disoriented.Yeah, it feels like I'm truly in a space movie where someone cuts the string that keeps you to the spaceship and you're just floating off.Like Sandra Bullock.That's how I feel right now and it is amazing. But people are arguing about the movie in all the ways that we hoped. "Are they making Chris Hansen a villain?" "No, they're making him a complicated character." "They're not sympathizing with the predators but they are looking at what sensationalism is and spectacle in this country and the frenzied way we latch onto media and use it as sort of a way to gain life force or something." I think all of these things are totally valid. We never wanted to discuss the ethics of online predators or whether justice should be served this way. It was about a cultural moment and what forces humans to show up in droves for something like this, appointment viewing.I also want to ask about Nathan Fielder because I know, for as much as this movie is so distinctly Lance, some of what you guys are doing here feels like it’s in conversation with this greater cinéma vérité universe that's happening with Fielder, with the Safdies, the Elizabeth Holmes doc, The Curse. So I wondered what, if anything, Nathan brought to the production or post.Well, Nathan was just a great creative mentor, especially to Lance. He would watch cuts of the film and give advice, a lot of sharp notes. But that was the extent of it. I know Nathan was a fan of To Catch a Predator too. I think many people in this world of docu-scripted, where is the line between reality and fantasy? I think To Catch a Predator has a special place in all of our hearts. I think we all spoke the same language.I know you mentioned that you are upside down right now, but do you have an idea of what's coming next for you?Right now I'm doing Spider-Punk with Daniel Kaluuya. Then I'm actually working on a film to direct but I will talk more about that very soon. I have a couple of other projects in the works with awesome people that I can't talk about publicly, I will most likely be assassinated if I bring them up.That's a good spot to be in. What would you say was the most surprising acknowledgment from someone high in the industry that had you geeked.Having [Denis] Villeneuve at the screening was so surreal.Man I popped out to the bathroom as soon as the credits rolled and he was ahead of me, I was kind of starstruck in a way that I don’t usually get.Through this process, Austin Abrams has become a really good friend. It's funny because we both have movies out at the same time, him with Resident Evil. We had an awesome night at Fantastic Fest just hanging out, [Zach] Cregger was there. It didn't feel like we were at war with each other, it felt like this rising tide lifts all boats or whatever.