….
He kept his head down and let it happen.
The script Álvarez was holding was not a standard draft and Simon knew this in the way he knew most things about LIE's productions; from proximity rather than briefing.
Regal had revised this script for months, documents arriving in Simon's inbox at timestamps that suggested sleep was a secondary priority.
What had changed from the source material, and why, Simon understood structurally without fully understanding creatively.
Watching Álvarez read told him where the significant work had been done.
….
The first section that produced extended stillness was deep in the first act.
League of Shadows territory.
Simon had read this section himself and found it denser than he expected, not longer, but more layered, each scene doing work that wasn't immediately visible on the surface.
The training sequences read differently from the comparable material he remembered from the first draft…
…and by 'first draft', in Regal's case, he meant the untouched script exactly as it had come from the system before any revisions or changes.
Bruce was not simply learning combat, and the structure of the sequences was closer to an induction - a philosophy being transmitted alongside the physical training, the two things inseparable, so that by the time Bruce could fight he had also, almost without noticing, started seeing the world the way his teachers saw it.
The point, as Simon understood it, was that Bruce's eventual rejection of Ra's al Ghul needed to cost something genuine.
You couldn't credibly show a man turning away from an ideology unless you had first shown why the ideology was genuinely appealing; not just to a villain, but to a grieving young man with a specific wound that the ideology spoke to directly.
The seduction had to be real for the departure to mean anything.
Álvarez read this section twice, and Simon watched him go back to the beginning of it without turning further forward.
….
The pacing was visible in the physical weight distribution of the document.
Simon knew the structural problems of a bloated first act well enough, an origin that discovered itself rather than executing a plan already formed, connective tissue accumulated across a long runtime into a noticeable drag.
Scenes doing one thing when two were available, and the inefficiency of a film finding its footing on the audience's time.
The script in Álvarez's hands was tighter, not shorter in terms of story, since the combined structure of origin and confrontation already guaranteed the longest runtime Regal had ever produced.
So moments that once served a single purpose now accomplished two, while anything unnecessary had been cut entirely.
Álvarez moved through this section steadily, the pen marking at regular intervals, with no extended pause, and the behaviour of someone building a visual plan in parallel with the text.
….
The action sequence sections were where the margins filled fastest.
Simon couldn't read the notation from across the room but he could see the density of it, more marks per page than any other section, the pen moving with the specific urgency of a director who had found the practical problems of sequences and was already inside their solutions.
He understood the general shape of what had changed.
The original action sequence approach that this material drew from had a consistent reputation, close-up editing, rapid cuts, and choreography difficult to follow.
The stated intention had been disorientation as design choice, the criminal's-eye-view of an unknowable force. It had worked in some places and obscured craft in others, and audiences had been unable to tell which they were receiving because they were receiving both simultaneously, which was a different problem from either one alone.
Regal had gone the other direction entirely.
The sequences as written were physically legible; wider frames, the choreography visible, the logic of movement allowed to complete itself before the cut.
What Bruce Wayne's body could do was made readable, not implied.
The physicality of years of specific training showed on the page in how the sequences were described, the kind of detail that only appears when a writer knows exactly what they want the camera to see.
Disorientation appeared in the script but selectively, at specific chosen moments rather than as a general atmospheric texture.
The difference between a tool and a habit.
Álvarez's eyes stopped completely in the second act, and there is something about this part that only Regal is aware of…
It is a scene that critics and audiences had spent years discussing and used a device to distribute the fear toxin through Gotham's water supply.
A microwave emitter, technically sophisticated, geographically elegant in its logic.
The whole city is reachable through existing infrastructure and it was a good idea for a plot device.
But it had one problem that the film's own internal logic could not survive.
A device powerful enough to instantly vaporise water in Gotham's pipe network would do the same to the water content in human tissue, and people are sixty percent water.
The protagonists and antagonists fighting directly next to this device should have died, should have been boiling from the inside, at the same moment the pipes started vaporising.
A film that had spent its entire runtime constructing a grounded, realistic world, that had made a deliberate choice to treat superhero mythology with the logic of a crime drama, collapsed its own internal argument at the exact moment the argument needed to hold.
Regal had replaced it.
The mechanism was biological now; a pathogen delivery system using Gotham's water treatment infrastructure as the distribution network.
The geographic logic was identical, and the fear toxin still reached the whole city through the water supply.
The act played with the same structure, stakes, and climactic confrontation.
It was a small change, the kind that costs nothing narratively, alters nothing structurally, and removes the one moment in a three-hour film where a careful audience would feel the floor shift under them.
….
The Alfred scenes took Simon by surprise when he finally understood what was happening in them.
He had noticed in his own read that they felt different, the relationship had a texture the plot didn't strictly require, scenes that could have been functional and were instead specific, carrying a quality of history that existed before the film began.
What those scenes were doing, he understood watching Álvarez slow down for them, was laying emotional infrastructure.
The first draft, if he remembers had sometimes felt emotionally withholding, intellectually coherent, thematically rigorous, but with a coldness that kept the audience at a slight distance from Bruce Wayne's interiority.
The problem wasn't the act of withholding itself, that was a perfectly valid tonal choice, it was that you couldn't withhold something the audience had never been given in the first place.
These Alfred scenes were the deposit.
Early, specifically, the relationship gave enough texture to establish who Bruce was before the grief became a construction project - before the training or any of it.
Alfred was the only surviving witness to the unarmoured version.
Not stated or explained, just present in the scenes with the quality of something real that had been going on for a long time before the camera arrived.
The film's emotional temperature later would be a choice the audience could feel rather than just observe, because they would know what the coldness was costing.
….
Harvey Dent appeared in three scenes during the first half, never as the focus but lingering at the edges of moments centered on Bruce, noticed, though rarely acknowledged.
A careful first read would register him as a recurring presence without immediately understanding what that recurrence meant.
A second read would catch something else: the composure.
Not the effortless calm of someone naturally steady, but the controlled restraint of a man actively maintaining himself. The difference between ease and the performance of ease, obvious only if you knew to look for it.
Each scene was thin as paper, quietly adding another layer that wouldn't fully reveal itself until the second half, when that control finally broke.
This was also something Regal had been careful about while making changes. The original combined material had been criticized for exactly this issue – Harvey Dent's psychological collapse happening too quickly, portraying a strong man shattered by a single loss without properly establishing the underlying instability that would make the breakdown believable.
The Joker had found something in Dent that the film hadn't quite put there first.
Regal had put it there first.
Across three scenes in the first half, distributed with enough distance between them that no single scene bore the weight of the foreshadowing, it accumulated across the runtime, below the threshold of notice, and would be felt rather than identified by an audience experiencing it for the first time.
….
The Joker was in the periphery of the first half, three appearances, two without dialogue, existing at the edge of Gotham the way something exists before it becomes the point.
Present enough to register, and specific enough that a second viewing would retroactively organise the first half around these moments as early warnings the film hadn't announced as such.
The second half, which Regal was directing himself, began at a specific seam in the document - a precise moment where one story completed and another arrived, the Joker stepping from the periphery into the centre and everything that had been built in the first half becoming the thing the second half would test.
Whether the two halves felt like one film was the structural question neither Simon nor Álvarez could fully answer yet.
That answer lived in the edit, months away.
Álvarez made his longest note yet alongside the third peripheral Joker appearance.
….
At 1:03 PM, Álvarez closed the script.
Simon waited without prompting.
"That was exhausting…"
Álvarez said it while rubbing both hands down his face, and when they dropped away his eyes were bright, the kind of bright that doesn't come from rest.
The words, tone, and expression – none of them matched each other.
All three were telling different truths at once, but what he said was true.
From an audience's seat, the script was brilliant.
Visceral, mythic, emotionally devastating in places he hadn't expected, and it's the kind of film you don't forget in the parking lot.
But from a director's chair?
This was a nightmare of a working document.
So many threads to hold simultaneously.
The parallel arcs of Batman and the Joker; a hero and a villain whose stories didn't just intersect but reflected, each one warping the other's shape the longer you looked.
Character decisions in the first act that only paid off in the third, tonal shifts that had to feel earned rather than jarring, and underneath all of it, a moral architecture so precisely constructed that one wrong camera angle could quietly collapse the whole argument the film was making.
He had felt it while reading, his mind constantly reaching, constantly trying to keep pace. Like watching a chess grandmaster play in real time and trying to understand not just the move being made, but the twelve moves it was setting up.
What kind of madness does it take to write something like this?
He felt the goosebumps on his forearms and didn't try to explain them away.
But Álvarez had made his decision.
Because he recognised; clearly, without drama, that an opportunity like this was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
The kind of project that doesn't come twice. If he let it go now, he would carry that particular regret for a very long time, and he knew himself well enough to know it wouldn't get lighter with the years.
He nodded once, opened the script again, and found the page where the first half ended and the second had not yet begun.
The precise seam and the exact frame where his work would stop and Regal's would begin.
He looked at it for a long moment.
More than anything else right now, he needed to understand the working mind of these people.
Not just what they were building, but how they thought.
"I want to talk to him about one point." Álvarez said. "The exact frame. So I know what he's building toward, and I know what I am building from."
"He has a window at four." Simon said.
Álvarez nodded and checked his watch.
Then his eyes drifted back to the open script, and it was clear enough, he wanted to return to it.
Simon muttered, almost like the thought had just surfaced. "It's pretty clear this is going to be a significant decision. So, do you want to see something? It's related to the film."
Álvarez tilted his head.
Simon was already getting to his feet, and the expression on his face was something close to pride.
"We call it the Batmobile."
….
.
[To be continued…]
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