Primetime writer Ajon Singh on the Chris Hansen meme machine and that Phoebe Bridgers NIN shirt

Lance Oppenheim may be the name presently affixed to Primetime’s ascent into one of Robert Pattinson’s most talked-about films of the year, but its exceptional screenplay’s particular strain of derangement belongs to Indian American writer Ajon Singh. His surreal writing takes the 2007 Esquire investigation into the rise and collapse of NBC’s televised predator-hunting circus and cannibalises it into a psychological crime thriller around the man, the myth and the legend of Chris Hansen, whose years of self-mythologised crusading had become inextricably enmeshed with the pursuit of other people’s depravity. Ajon speaks to The Hindu about the project’s genesis, the creative influences that informed its strange formal style, and the immediate internet afterlife it has acquired since its release.

Named after the opening verse of the Guru Granth Sahib, Ajooni Saibhang, Ajon is now based in Los Angeles, though Primetime was made while he was based in New York. The provenance of his original script came from the Esquire piece “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” which examined the dubious machinery surrounding To Catch a Predator, most consequentially the sting involving Texas prosecutor Bill Conradt, whose televised suicide exposed the extremities of the format becoming ever more invested in its own unfettered spectacle. Ajon’s first conception of the material was closer to a political thriller, but the screenplay underwent a creative reconception once Lance Oppenheim and Robert Pattinson entered the project.

Though initially only attached as producer, Ajon suspected Pattinson was discussing Hansen with a more personal investment than he was letting on. “We had this epic night where he had me, Lance [Oppenheim], and his producing partner Brighton McCloskey,” Ajon says. He recalls Pattinson speaking about Hansen as though another actor would play him, except that he kept reciting lines from the script, talking about Hansen’s habits and describing himself running around a local reservoir listening to the Chris Hansen podcast. Ajon caught on. “I would pretend to go to the bathroom throughout the night, and I would take notes on my phone about what he was saying. I left that dinner thinking, “he’s talking about it for another actor, but I think he’s actually talking about it for himself,” he chuckles.

Five days later, after speaking with Oppenheim about a game plan, Ajon had rewritten the entire character for Pattinson, getting him onto the film while he remained a producer. That dual role became “a huge superpower” for the film, he says. “He had an immense amount of involvement and creative interest. He was constantly wondering about different scenes. Once he was on as an actor, he would really try to stress-test every scene, which is good, because you want the film to be as hardy and bulletproof as possible by the time you actually shoot it.”

In the weeks leading up to the shoot, Ajon, Oppenheim and Pattinson worked late in a freezing Brooklyn office, often until two or three in the morning, “sometimes arguing, sometimes hugging”. Once they went into production, Ajon says, “you’re in the Rob world.” The plan they had spent weeks working out could then give way to eight different takes on the same scene, “all very different,” and “each one of them profoundly special.”

If Primetime has a singular, most influential cinematic progenitor, it would likely be Sidney Lumet’s Network. The 1976 black comedy satire starring Peter Finch, occupies a particularly exalted place in Ajon’s personal pantheon (and Letterboxd Top 4). “Network is one of the biggest inspirations for me in general, even in the way I live my life,” he says, praising screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky as one of the all time greats. But his conception of Primetime also came from looking at the historical moment in which To Catch a Predator emerged. “The media landscape was drastically changing from the kind of network era, where Friends and Seinfeld was popular. Those shows eventually went off the air, and they had to figure out what to do, how to fill that emptiness or that void,” he says. 

He also saw the period as “a real turning point in technology and art in American and global culture,” which is why he wanted to make “Network for the era of me growing up,” while also capturing “the commercialism and the capitalism and the branding” of the period and the way its imagery and symbolism continue to echo into the present. His other inspirations ranged from James L. Brooks’ Broadcast News (1987), István Szabó’s Mephisto (1981) and Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1973). He also describes stealing a lot from “the colour and the energy” of Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000), while the William Friedkin classic The Exorcist (1973) helped shape the film’s sense of “mass hallucination and mass hysteria.”

Among the film’s many surreal and intellectually arresting sequences, the one that really caught me off guard was Hansen’s supposed trip to Kerala to investigate the missing children, and the peculiar metamorphosis by which that investigation eventually crystallises into an almost figurative monster that he spends the remainder of the film pursuing. Ajon traces its conception to a New York Times report about child disappearances in Uttar Pradesh in the 1990s. 

“One child was being stolen from each of these villages in Uttar Pradesh, and nobody could figure out what was happening. So they started to turn on each other. There were lynchings and beatings, and people couldn’t understand what was happening. When the Indian government investigated, they determined that it was actually one pack of wolves moving across the state, taking these children. But what the villagers were reporting was that it wasn’t a wolf. Some of them described it as a monstrous, wolf-man-like creature. I thought that was a really strange story from a reputable news source, and I felt so compelled to do something with it.”

Ajon then fused the story with Hansen’s real-life investigation of child exploitation in India to make “Chris a mythical hero, and give him this mythical villain”. He adds how the mystical dimension emerged through Oppenheim and Pattinson, who pushed the screenplay to make Hansen a sort of “angel of punishment” who descends down the stairs “like Dracula.”

It would have been professionally negligent not to bring up that one Nine Inch Nails T-shirt which Phoebe Bridgers wears in the film, given how disproportionately delighted the internet seems to have been by the sight of it. Turns out I wasn’t the only one doing the DiCaprio-pointing-at-the-screen routine at the NIN cameo, with the throwaway reference becoming one of those random, tiny details online spectators have subsequently fangirled over. 

In the scene, Bridgers’ Del, one of Hansen’s young decoys, is wearing the shirt when Bokeem Woodbine’s police chief spots it and asks her about the band. Ajon explains that the choice was rooted in Del’s characterisation: “Lance and the costume designer found that it would be perfect for a character who’s a little alt, a little goth, and has really good music taste, but is also very fungible. At times she plays this boy, at times she plays this girl. So we wanted to play with those alt bands that she’s into; and then it’s also Phoebe, who herself is such a famous musician with such great taste.”

The exchange itself however, was improvised. “I think Bokeem Woodbine improvised that line and then Phoebe improvised the response. We were all standing behind the monitors, just laughing. We shot all the scripted stuff and then let them walk around and see how the characters existed in that space. Even though I’m the screenwriter, sometimes I find that some of the best stuff is unplanned. It just comes out of people.” 

Perhaps the funniest thing to happen to Primetime since its release is that a film about the pathology of watching has itself become something to memeify and pass around. The internet has taken a vested interest in Hansen’s “you see how this looks right?” meme, and more inexplicably, that one stupid headshot of Pattinson as Hansen that has been repeatedly furnished with the most random song lyrics.

Unsurprisingly, Hansen too has not remained a passive spectator to the discourse. After attending an opening-night screening, he posted his own photograph riffing on Pattinson’s iconic tracksuit meme, captioned “Two can play at that game,” before later weighing in on the film himself.

Ajon does see the irony in Hansen participating and perpetuating the cycle. “He’s become a meme himself, and he’s sort of self-satirizing with the branding, with the ‘you see how this looks’, and the ‘have a seat’. But what has been most shocking is that whenever he does press conferences or gives his opinions, at the end he always says, ‘You should go see the movie.’ He still promotes the movie,” Ajon chuckles. 

More meaningful to Ajon, has been the response from audiences in India, who have been sending him photographs from screenings in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata: “My DMs have been flooded with the nicest messages from India. In Hollywood, as far as I’m aware, there’s only a handful of us Indians and Indian Americans. So the support is so meaningful. It makes me feel so happy that it’s connecting with all these people. This is my first produced film, so I couldn’t dream of it playing out any better than it is, and I’m very grateful”.

Primetime is currently running in Indian theatres in association with Lionsgate Play