Primetime: Nobody wanted to read the script, then Robert Pattinson called

A few years ago, Ajon Singh found himself in Robert Pattinson’s bathroom, furiously typing notes on his iPhone.

The screenwriter took advantage of an evening of wine at Pattinson’s house in Los Angeles to discuss Prime timea specific script that everyone in town had refused to read, but had somehow landed in the hands of the A-list actor.

Pattinson was already on hand to produce, but declined to play the role of Chris Hansen, the former Data line NBC reporter who birthed the 2000s sensation To catch a predator.

But that night, as the drinks flowed, Pattinson couldn’t help but think about what an actor could do with the character. A gonzo portrait of Hansen emerged, a more mystical take on the character than Singh’s original draft, which was more of a political thriller.

Occasionally, Singh would excuse himself to go to the bathroom and jot down Pattinson’s ideas.

“I finally started to put together a picture of how he envisioned this character — and I loved it, because it wasn’t philosophically at odds with what I’d already written,” Singh said. The Hollywood Reporter.

Like Singh and Prime time Director Lance Oppenheim left Pattinson’s house, there seemed to be an opening. Maybe they could convince him to play this role. “We felt him bend over,” says Singh.

Singh and Oppenheim spent the next few days working on the script in a Mid-City office, then Singh spent five days alone rewriting Hansen’s character, infusing a mystical, avenging-angel undertone to his character.

They sent it to Pattinson, who took a weekend to give his response: yes, he would star in the film.

A24 released the $15 million film on September 24, and it has grossed $42 million domestically to date, with Gen Z flocking to theaters. (69 percent of the opening weekend audience was under 30.) The film was hailed as a dreamlike exploration of the lines between justice and exploitation, even though its real-life subject, Hansen, threatened to take action against the studio.

Being at the center of a zeitgeist film is part of a stunning turn of events for Singh, 31, who spent years facing obstacles as he supported himself by driving Uber and working as an assistant.

“I really struggled with this “center left” label. I thought it was a really cool label. For example, “Your niche” or “You have taste,” says Singh. “But that means: ‘Not commercial. Not bankable. Unsellable.'”

Yet he always believed there was an audience for his screenplays, if anyone would give them a try.

Singh grew up in Southern California and majored in economics at USC. He always loved film, and rather than continuing on the path to a doctorate in economics, he began writing screenplays after graduation. He drove the graveyard shift for Uber from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. and spent his days writing in a small, cockroach-infested Hollywood apartment.

“It was really scary. There were people in the back looking at you like that,” he says, with a dead look, of his time with Uber. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to die tonight.'”

Uber didn’t last long. Nor did he work in the CAA mailroom, where he worked in the hopes of meeting people in the industry who would read his articles.

Eventually, he found mentors in television writers Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster, who hired him as a writing assistant for the Netflix limited series. Analgesic. Other writer’s assistant jobs followed, including that of a showrunner so cruel that Singh considered moving to San Luis Obispo to become a guide for its famous elephant seal congregation. (He never did that.)

Years into his screenwriting odyssey, he finally wrote something that was successful: a television pilot called Belly.

The storyline was about a late NFL draft pick who gets injured in his very first play and returns home to Alaska to become a fisherman. At first it seems like a show about a Deadliest Catch-style character. But in the final moments of the pilot, its high concept is revealed: the protagonist falls from a fishing boat and is swallowed by a whale. The rest of the series takes place in the belly of the beast. (Unlike the next realistic film Whale fallwith Austin Abrams, Singh’s friend, it was a fantastic take, ala Pinocchio — with chandeliers providing lighting inside the whale.)

The series never happened, but it was Singh’s first script to circulate in Hollywood. “I started getting calls rather than letting myself grovel,” says Singh. One of those calls was to Erick Mendoza, now his manager at Untitled.

In 2023, Singh met Aj Bourscheid, an old friend from CAA and now at Range Media Partners. In came producer William Iannaccone, who knew Bourscheid. Iannaccone mentioned that he opted for a 2007 Squire article on the most famous operation of To catch a predator story, which ended with the suicide of a Texas prosecutor.

Singh was immediately intrigued. He grew up watching To catch a predatormemorizing the authors’ ridiculous pseudonyms, like Jeremy’s Talented Tongue. He was convinced he could do something special with this concept.

He did months of research, watching every Hansen video and listening to every Hansen podcast he could find. It took hundreds of hours in total. He rigorously outlined the story, so that when it came time to write, the screenplay was completed in two weeks.

His producer and manager both liked it enough to start removing it. But no one in Hollywood would read it.

“It was really devastating,” Singh says. “Read it, then move on. If you don’t read it, it hurts my feelings.”

Months passed and he lost hope that Prime time would gain ground.

Then, a miracle: Robert Patinson managed to get his hands on the script and wanted to Zoom with Singh. (He still doesn’t know how Pattinson got the script, but he’s heard that Almost Friday filmmaker Tyler Falbo passed it on to Pattinson or his producing partner Brighton McCloskey at a party.)

“They got the script,” Singh says of Zoom with Pattinson and McCloskey. “It was the most rewarding thing, maybe in my entire career. They simply responded to it in a specific and thematic way.

At the end of the Zoom, Singh was so moved by their reaction that he took his photo: “I thought, ‘Rob, if you had some free time in your life, I think you and I could do something really special with this movie, with you as Chris Hansen.’

Pattinson remained silent. Eventually, he admitted that he thought about it too, but no, the role wasn’t for him.

He nevertheless agreed to produce, which was a major victory for Singh and the team, who now had a viable way to launch the film.

Shortly after, Singh received an email from someone named Oppenheim. This was an in-depth review of Prime time script, which Oppenheim had read at Pattinson’s birthday party the day before.

Singh remembers thinking, “Wow, this is the nicest thing. Who is Lance Oppenheim?”

It turned out that Oppenheim was the hot young filmmaker behind documentaries like A kind of paradise And Sperm world. He sent Singh a previously unreleased version of his HBO docuseries Ren Faireand Singh ate it in one day. He was addicted to Oppenheim and the two formed a close bond. They felt like creative soulmates.

Even if more bankable directors were present for Prime timeSingh was convinced that Oppenheim was the right person for the job. The team agreed and Oppenheim joined as director. Suddenly the project became hot, with A24 agreeing to finance the film and giving it a production start date – even without an advance in place.

“It’s really a mind-blowing experience, because I went from not understanding the script – no one reads it – to getting a financing deal done in what seemed like two weeks,” Singh recalls.

Pattinson eventually boarded to star, and Singh, his girlfriend, and his dog got in his car and drove to New York in late 2024. There, he spent long nights in an office with Oppenheim and Pattinson writing the script, sometimes only emerging into the bitterly cold winter until 2 a.m.

“There’s sort of a feedback loop when you work with Lance and Rob. Things are constantly alive and changing,” says Singh. “The only way to survive this process is to be fluid.”

For most screenwriters, the work ends well before production begins. But Singh was given the rare opportunity to stay with the project throughout production and serve as executive producer.

He lived in a house in New Orleans with Oppenheim, cinematographer David Bolen, editor Daniel Garber and producer Christian Vazquez during filming. They had movie nights after work, while during the day part of his job was to recall old versions of the script because Oppenheim might bring back something they had abandoned months earlier.

Among the moments resurrected for the film was a monologue in which Hansen explained his pitch for the series to a fan on a plane. (Without spoiling it, this involves talking about a porch, a man, and his penis.)

As Singh recalls, Oppenheim asked Pattinson to do the monologue, but the actor hadn’t read that draft of the scene in months. Oppenheim persisted, and somehow Pattinson got through it.

“He just let it out of him,” says…