….
The pre-production for [The Dark Knight] was, Simon had concluded, the most genuinely exhausting one he had done in six years of working for Regal Seraphsail.
Mind you, he had been part of all of the MDCU multi million projects; that required superhero costumes, armors, sets, green screen work, and CGI.
The difference was that on those productions, Regal was at forefront leading the team. He arrived with the vision already fully formed, the casting instincts settled, and the structural decisions made long before Simon had to operationalize them.
Simon's role was execution, difficult and demanding, but execution nonetheless.
The shape of the thing was given to him.
However, [The Dark Knight] was different; and not to mention there is no Darren too, with whom he has a long standing understanding of work dividend.
And on top of it, Regal was directing the second chapter himself, sure, but as of now he is mostly occupied with [John Wick] production.
And the [Batman] script; which had been the most complex thing he had written, a document that combined two films' worth of length into a single three-hour structure, was surely gonna take longer pre production than any normal film.
Honestly, he always thought nothing could top the first film in [Harry Potter] franchise pre-production; but yeah, this project proved him wrong.
Anyway, his biggest concern after finalising the main cast was…
…to finalize the director who is gonna direct the first chapter.
Right. They haven't yet decided on that.
The first chapter is just as crucial, if not more than the second chapter.
I mean, people should first sit through the first before they arrive at the second, right?
So the director should be someone capable of handling large-scale origin mythology, while the second chapter was being reserved for a man still in the middle of another shoot.
He had a list. The list had columns. Several of the columns had entries he was not satisfied with.
….
Christian Isaac, at least, was now fully and officially on board, and began his rehearsals, and prep for the role.
Simon had watched him arrive on the LIE lot.
And for their first meeting, their relationship and actor and line producers had been smooth sailing; luckily, the actor didn't have the usual egotism of a superstar, and could get along well.
On top of it, with a simple first look test being completed, he seemed perfectly capable of justifying the role.
The physicality was immediately apparent.
Regal had been clear in the character brief: not too bulky.
Bruce Wayne in his version was not a man defined by his body's size but by what his body could do, which was different, and the distinction mattered in the way it always mattered when a director was thinking about what a performance communicated before dialogue started.
Isaac had read the brief multiple times, according to Patricia Holst, and had arrived with specific requirements about the physical approach; not the action sequences, which was where most actors focused their preparation questions, but the way Bruce Wayne moved in civilian contexts.
The controlled stillness of a man who has spent years training his body into something dangerous and has to continuously manage how much of that is visible in ordinary rooms.
The physical transformation was already underway.
Four weeks in, the work was visible in the way it was supposed to be, not yet complete, but directional, moving toward the specific version of Bruce Wayne the script required.
That was the resolved column.
….
The director column was the one Simon returned to most often and with the least satisfaction.
The competition had become Samantha's project from the moment Regal explained what he wanted, partly because Simon was already operating at capacity.
But also mostly because Samantha is professional in handling this kind of organizational intelligence.
She had built it cleanly, short film submissions, a theme brief derived from the emotional core of the Batman Begins half of the script; childhood trauma, construction of identity from loss, and the way grief becomes architecture, deliberately obscure enough that only people with genuine instincts would find the right frequency.
Open entry, global, three months from announcement to submission deadline.
Four hundred and twelve submissions.
Samantha had reviewed them all with the assistance of a small team.
However, she made sure she had watched every submission personally, made her own notes independently before seeing the panel's assessments, and arrived at the shortlist with her own position.
The shortlist had twelve films and Regal watched them over a weekend, then he called Samantha on Sunday evening and said one name.
….
Fede Álvarez.
Simon had looked the name up immediately after Regal's call.
A thirty-seven years old Uruguayan director.
He had built his way into the industry through the specific path of someone who had started with nothing and had made that nothing visible.
A short film called [Panic Attack!] shot in his home country for virtually no money, which had depicted a robot invasion of Montevideo with an inventiveness.
The offers had been for horror, as he had built his reputation through [The Evil Dead] and its follow-up, committing himself to practical effects and physical filmmaking in a way that placed him among the directors who understood a simple truth:
What the camera physically captures feels different from something created later in post-production, and audiences sense that difference even when they can't explain it.
His short film for the competition, submitted without his name attached, under the panel review process, had been fourteen minutes long and had depicted a boy building something in the ruins of a burned house.
The film told almost entirely through physical action and environmental detail, the trauma of it communicated through what was present in the frame rather than what was said about it.
Samantha had ranked it first among the twelve on the shortlist before the panel comparison.
Regal had called it immediately.
….
Simon's honest position, which he was keeping to himself, was that he wasn't sure.
Not about Álvarez's talent, the short film was undeniable, the prior work was undeniable, the instincts were visible in everything he had made.
The uncertainty was structural.
[The Dark Knight] was not a horror film.
It was not a contained genre piece with a clear tonal language that an experienced practitioner could execute with confidence. It was the most expensive, most structurally complex, most philosophically ambitious first half of a split-directed MDCU film in a franchise that had never done a split-directed film before.
It was, by any reasonable measure, not the first major film at this scale.
But Regal had looked at the competition submissions, which were designed to surface a specific kind of instinct, and had identified in Álvarez's fourteen minutes exactly the quality the first half of [The Dark Knight] needed.
The ability to tell a large story through small physical truths, to make grief architectural, to build a world that felt like it had a history before the camera arrived.
Simon knew this and understood the reasoning, yet he was still not entirely sure.
He was also aware, from six years of experience, that his uncertainty about Regal's unconventional choices had a consistent track record of being proven wrong, which was not a comfortable thing to sit with but was the honest accounting of the situation.
….
Álvarez was currently in Regal's office reading the script for the first time.
For a second he wondered how he ended up here in this room.
It was yesterday morning.
He got a call that had lasted eleven minutes and Álvarez had spent nine of them saying variations of nothing useful while Samantha Cross explained what was happening in the patient tone.
She had led with the competition results, he had won, the prize money was being processed, congratulations, and he had said thank you in the genuine way because the money was the actual reason he had entered and genuine gratitude for actual money was not complicated.
Then she said: "There's something else."
Which was the sentence, he would think later, that divided his life into before and after in a way he had not consented to.
She told him about Regal, a script and the first chapter and what directing it would mean and the timeline and the production context and approximately sixty percent of it had gone directly into a part of his brain that was not currently accepting deliveries because the part that was still functioning was stuck on the first sentence and hadn't finished with it yet.
"I am sorry." he had said, at some point. "When you say Regal Seraphsail personally–"
"Yes." she said.
"Right, and the film is–"
"The Dark Knight is going to be part of the MDCU, and Regal's own script."
He had looked at the wall of his apartment, which was the wall of someone who had been working on a microbudget horror project for eight months and eating accordingly.
And had tried to locate the version of himself that was capable of responding to this information with something resembling coherence.
He hadn't found it immediately.
"Take your time." Samantha said, which was either very kind or a sign that she had been through this particular conversation enough times to have a standard approach to it.
"I am–" He stopped and started again. "I entered the competition because the brief was interesting and I needed the prize money. I want to be honest about that. I wasn't… this wasn't what I was preparing for."
"It's understandable…." she said. "Nothing is set in stone yet this will be only moving forwards after your acceptance."
He had no response to that that he trusted, so he said nothing, which she apparently interpreted correctly as I have heard you and I am processing rather than I have disconnected.
She gave him the address, the time, what to bring, what not to bring.
She said: "Take your time before you reach out to us."
He thanked her and hung up, next few seconds he sat in his apartment for a while looking at the wall.
The wall continued to be the wall of someone on a microbudget horror project.
He was not entirely sure that was still true.
…and that's how he ended up here…
….
Simon had been watching him closely since Álvarez had arrived.
The initial greetings were normal just shaking hands, exchanging a few sentences in the easy way of someone who found most rooms accessible, and went in.
That had been an hour and forty minutes ago.
Simon had given Álvarez the script at 10:14 AM, pointed him toward the chair by the window, and said: "Take as long as you need."
It was now 12:47 PM.
Simon had spent the two and a half hours at the desk on the other side of the room working through his own production pile; contractor confirmations, casting logistics, the endless administrative architecture of a film that was still largely theoretical and needed to become practical very soon.
He didn't interrupt or check in, only occasionally glancing up to see where Álvarez was in the script, which told him enough without needing a conversation.
Some sections moved quickly, others produced stillness, and the long focused kind that looked like nothing from the outside and was clearly everything from the inside.
Simon had a rough map of the script's structure from his own reading, and it was enough to do his job.
Not the way Álvarez was doing it now, with the pen that had appeared from somewhere and was moving continuously, filling margins with notation that Simon couldn't read from across the room but could see was dense and architectural.
He kept his head down and let it happen.
….
.
[To be continued…]
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