....

[Same Day | Evening]

Regal sent the script to Derren in his usual red book method he had adopted since the [Harry Potter] franchise.

Honestly, there is a comedy gig going around the industry, where whoever had received Regal’s personalised red book script, they are officially about to become superstars.

Derren couldn’t help but chuckle at that.

However, he had made sure he kept the script in the most possible safe place; he knew the consequences of losing even a single page of script.

And trust him when he says this; Regal is the scariest when anything happens to his script, which shows how much he respects his work.

Nevertheless, before getting into the script, Derren had taken his peaceful time.

The script was large.

And he was sure it was gonna be a while.

....

Finally, he started reading at 9:31 PM.

And–

The first thing he noticed was the structure.

He had known, in the broad outline, that Regal was actually dividing the script into two Chapters, and honestly he is uncertain why he is doing it.

And now that he got the chance to look at it; he is literally dividing the film into two Chapters.

Chapter 1: The Batman Origin.

And–

Chapter 2: The Dark Knight.

But what’s the film title?

Yep, he had been calling it ’Origin Story’ and ’The Dark Knight’, but they are for now just being used as working titles, or he wasn’t sure if he was gonna choose one.

Anyway, coming back to the context of the script.

The first Chapter moved the way origin stories move when they are written by someone who finds origin stories slightly less interesting than what the origin is in service of: efficiently, propulsively, with genuine weight in the Bruce Wayne sections but with a constant undertow of something coming.

The League of Shadows material was extraordinary on the page; the philosophy of it, the internal logic of what they believed and why that belief was coherent even as it was wrong.

Bruce’s journey through it reads as the story of a man building an identity out of grief and discipline and arriving at something functional and flawed and genuinely his.

And in the margins of all of it; appearing in three scenes in the first half, never the focus, never named yet, just present in the way that certain people are present before you understand what they are...

The Joker.

Darren read those three scenes twice each. He read them and then sat back and thought about what he had read and then read them again.

Then he turned the page and the second half began and the script became something different.

....

It took him six hours and forty minutes to reach the Joker part.

And just remember, he considers himself as a faster reader, who was used to reading longer material at pace without losing the thread, due to the workline he is in.

He was slow because he kept stopping, and also the fact that the script was longer.

...and he had to give more time for a few parts; the script forced him to do it.

The scenes where the Joker said something that was not, when you examined it honestly, wrong. The scenes where the argument he was making had internal consistency and Bruce Wayne, for all his intelligence and discipline and preparation, could not immediately refute it.

He stopped at those scenes and sat with them and turned them over and looked at them from different angles the way you look at something that has unsettled you without being able to immediately name why.

At 1:47 AM he got up and walked to the kitchen and stood at the window for a while looking at the dark garden and the sky that was starting, very faintly, to grey at the edges.

He thought: this character is not a villain.

Then he thought: he is absolutely a villain.

....

Then he sat with the fact that both of those things were true simultaneously and that the discomfort of holding both was precisely what the character was designed to produce.

And that producing it on the page was one thing and producing it on screen; in a body, with a face, in a room with another actor playing Bruce Wayne, was a different order of challenge entirely.

He went back to the script.

....

At 3:22 AM he re-read the interrogation scene.

He read it twice now. But he just continued to read again and again.

The scene was a conversation, and by far the simplest setup. That was all it was, technically; two men in a room, one on each side of a table, talking.

There is no CGI, action, or spectacle; just words, and underneath the words, the Joker constructing something in real time that Bruce couldn’t dismantle because the tools Bruce had built his entire identity around were precisely what the Joker was using against him.

Darren thought about playing that scene.

He thought about the specific quality it required; the particular kind of stillness underneath the chaos, the intelligence that the chaos was always in service of, the way the Joker in this script was never surprised by anything because he had already modelled every possible response and found them all equally useful to him.

....

He finished at 4:06 AM.

The last page was not an ending in the conventional sense.

It was more like a door closing on an argument that had been made over two hundred and sixty-three pages, and the closing of the door didn’t resolve the argument, it just stopped the conversation at the point where the audience had to carry it themselves.

He read the last three lines twice and then sat in the quiet of his kitchen with the script closed on the table in front of him and the early morning beginning to appear in the window.

Two hundred and sixty-three pages.

Six hours and thirty-five minutes from first page to last.

He had read scripts before, hundreds of them, in his line producing work; reading for logistics, for scheduling, for the practical architecture of how a story would become a production.

He had never once finished a script and then sat in silence for several minutes unable to immediately move on to the next thing.

He sat in silence for seven minutes, then he picked up his phone.

....

It was 4:13 AM and Regal answered on the third ring, which meant he had either not slept or had slept briefly and badly, which given the [Batman] script was probably both.

"You’re awake." Darren said.

"So are you."

"I just finished reading the script..."

A pause. "And?"

Darren looked at the script on the table. "You said this wasn’t the final draft."

"It’s the second draft, the structure is locked but there are still scenes I want to rework."

"The interrogation scene."

"What about it?"

"Is that staying as written?"

"More or less. Why?"

Darren was quiet for a moment. "Because it’s the best scene in the script and it’s also the scene that’s going to determine whether the whole second half works or doesn’t, and if the performance isn’t exactly right in that scene then everything the film has built for two and a half hours collapses in one room."

He paused. "I just want to understand what I am looking at."

"You’re looking at the scene where the Joker wins the argument." Regal said. "Not the fight, but an argument. Bruce stops him physically but the Joker makes his point and Bruce has no answer and the audience knows he has no answer and the film doesn’t pretend he does."

"Right." Darren looked at the kitchen window. "That’s what I thought."

"Is that a problem?"

"It’s terrifying is what it is." He sat back. "I have been reading this script for six and a half hours and I need to tell you something honestly."

"Go ahead."

"The character on these pages, whoever ends up playing him, isn’t just going to be remembered for the film." he said. "People are going to be talking about him for years, arguing over the ideas, over whether the Joker is wrong and why, and more dangerously, about the moments where he isn’t entirely wrong and what that actually says."

He paused, letting that settle.

"I have never read a villain who made me stop and genuinely question things like this - multiple times in a single script."

Darren paused again. "Can I ask you something."

"You’ve been asking me things for a decade." Regal replied. "That part isn’t new."

"This one is." Darren said, eyes still on the pages. "When you wrote the Joker did you know where the line was between making him compelling and making him too compelling?"

Regal didn’t answer immediately.

"I knew where the line was." he said at last, measured and precise. "And I stayed on it very carefully, because the Joker gets to present his argument, but he doesn’t get to be right, and the film has to hold both of those truths at the same time, because that tension is the story, Bruce learning how to respond to someone who can’t be answered with the tools he started with."

He paused briefly before continuing. "The performance has to understand that completely, because the Joker has to believe he’s right, while the actor playing him has to know he isn’t, and both of those things have to exist together without collapsing into each other."

Darren absorbed that, thinking it through.

"You already put that in the script." he said slowly. "That distinction - it’s there."

"I put the argument in." Regal corrected. "The actor has to bring the belief."

"And you think I can do that."

"I think you’ve spent six years studying people without calling it acting, and that’s exactly what this character needs, someone who watches from the outside, understands how people function, and can hold a fully consistent internal logic that most people wouldn’t want to sit with."

A small pause. "And for what it’s worth, you stopped at the right moments." Regal added. "The scenes you mentioned, the fact that those are the ones that made you put the script down means you understood what the character is doing there, and that’s not nothing."

Darren let that settle.

Outside, the first light of morning was beginning to take shape, and somewhere beyond the window, birds had started their predictable, irritating optimism.

"Send me the third draft when it’s ready." he said.

Regal’s voice came back, lighter, edged with something knowing. "That’s a lot of interest for someone who was planning to bomb the audition."

Darren glanced at the closed script on his kitchen table, two hundred and sixty-three pages of it.

"If this didn’t excite me." he said, almost to himself. "Then I don’t deserve to be working in this industry."

He picked up the script, shifting it under his arm. "Anyway, go to sleep, you sound like someone who’s been living with Batman for three days."

"Goodnight." he added.

"Morning." Regal replied, and hung up.

Darren set his phone down and looked at the script one more time.

The Joker.

In The Dark Knight.

Directed by Regal Seraphsail, who had apparently seen something in him three years ago that he hadn’t fully seen in himself yet, and had waited, with the specific patience he applied to everything he cared about, for the right moment to say so.

He put the script on his desk.

He went to bed though he did not sleep for a while.

.

....

[To be continued...]

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