Chris Hansen was the first person to speak against Primetime , the new film in which Robert Pattinson plays the former TV host. The film chronicles Hansen’s rise and the birth of his iconic show, To Catch A Predator. The show saw Hansen catch American men in sting operations as they tried to meet minors for sexual relations. The show was a hit on TV in the early 2000s before it all came to a grinding halt after a subject killed themselves on the show.
HT: What was that one moment that Rob surprised you with his interpretation of something that you wrote in the film?
So that’s why he’s like stumbling across the room. Primetime, directed by Lance Oppenheimer, stars Pattinson as Hansen, and shows how exactly the show began and what went down on that fateful night when Bill Conradt shot himself. Amid the praise the film has received and the criticism from its subject, Chris Hansen, writer Ajon Singh talks to Hindustan Times about the reception, laurels, and brickbats. Excerpts: Ajon Singh: The original script was mostly a political thriller. It was more about the entertainment industry and law enforcement. The drama and the story’s thrust are pretty much the same. What Rob and Lance brought was the idea that Chris Hansen is actually an angel of punishment. One thing we all talked about was the psychic toll. That was the term we used over and over: the psychic toll that this line of work takes to repeatedly humiliate and punish people. What does that do to a man? So how do you go from something small and materialistic or superficial like that to something so cosmic by the end of the film? So it’s a metamorphosis. Ajon Singh: He surprised me in every scene. He’s unbelievable. Every single version of every take was fascinating. He would do eight takes. Each of them would be different. If he did even one of those takes, I would be thrilled, but he did eight takes that were all very profoundly good. But one that comes to mind is that scene in the precinct. The way we had written it felt sort of standard, but the way he always envisioned Chris was as this weakened wizard. He has this very tortured expression on his face, and he really drags the words out. The other one that really impressed me is the opening sting, the way he does it. We didn’t want to do this photorealistic mimicry of the original show. We wanted to do a dramatised, heightened version of that. And he turned it into something really terrifying. It’s almost like a Dracula performance.
