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Barely out of his twenties, Lance Oppenheim has already established himself as something of a\u00a0moving image renaissance man. With documentaries, shorts, music videos and more under his belt, he turns his hand to dramatic fiction with Primetime<\/i>, a\u00a0portrait of American TV<\/span> presenter Chris Hansen (played with oily precision by Robert Pattinson) who was responsible for the ratings behemoth, To Catch a\u00a0Predator,<\/i> in which potential sex offenders are caught in the\u00a0act.<\/p>\n LWLies: You would have been eight when <\/strong>To Catch a\u00a0Predator<\/strong><\/i> started. I\u2019m curious what place Chris Hansen occupied in your cultural consciousness?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Oppenheim: It\u2019s a\u00a0long story, but I\u2019m gonna try and make it really short. I\u00a0discovered the show through South Park<\/i> and, of course, through eBaum\u2019s World. I\u00a0was obsessed with this sketch group, The Human Giant. There\u2019s a\u00a0lot of great comics and comedy directors that worked on it. And Mad TV<\/span>, where Jordan Peele plays a\u00a0Predator and I\u00a0forget who plays Chris Hansen in it. But anyway, I\u00a0kept seeing all of these imitations of To Catch a\u00a0Predator,<\/i> but I\u00a0didn\u2019t really understand what I\u00a0was seeing. I\u00a0think it wasn\u2019t until I\u00a0was in middle school when the show was off air that I\u00a0discovered that I\u00a0had actually watched the show, and I\u00a0started to understand why people were so obsessed with\u00a0it.<\/p>\n What were your initial impressions of Hansen?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n I thought Chris Hansen \u2013 at least in my child brain version of him \u2013 was like a\u00a0superhero. He reminded me of Tony Montana in Scarface<\/i> with his catchphrases and one-liners, and there was something so epic about the way he would enter these rooms and essentially have this superhuman ability to dismantle someone\u2019s life with cameras. And not only that, I\u00a0guess I\u00a0just was so fascinated by like the theatricality of it and how it almost, like an adult actor pretending to be a\u00a0child, hovering in the background as a\u00a0man is like crying and realising that his life is effectively over. So there was something that I\u00a0was confused about as a\u00a0kid. I\u00a0remember thinking, is this like MTV<\/span>\u2019s Punk\u2019d<\/i>? Did it feel like it would belong there? Or was it like a\u00a0news programme? Or was it like a\u00a0circus where Chris Hansen was the ringleader? There was something very carnivalesque about the whole thing. And yeah, I\u00a0guess it stuck with me for a\u00a0really long\u00a0time.<\/p>\n Although Chris Hansen is at the centre of the story, <\/strong>Primetime<\/strong><\/i> also explores this moral terrain from multiple perspectives, including an actor and producer on <\/strong>To Catch a\u00a0Predator<\/strong><\/i>.<\/strong><\/p>\n I think one of the reasons the show was so successful was because it\u2019s like, encoded in our DNA<\/span>. For as long as human civilisation has existed, there was always like a\u00a0pillory, there was always a\u00a0whipping post, and there was always a\u00a0person that was doling out the lashes. The thing that\u2019s that\u2019s different about it is they are commercialising it and turning it into entertainment. And I\u00a0thought it would be interesting, from a\u00a0cinematic point of view just to attempt to turn this vision of justice into a\u00a0performance.<\/p>\n The thing I\u00a0find so fascinating about <\/strong>To Catch a\u00a0Predator <\/strong><\/i>within a\u00a0contemporary milieu is that, at the same time as this is out there, Chris Hansen still has this huge fan\u00a0base.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m very aware that these people are on Reddit \u2013 they\u2019re out there, they\u2019re in the comments and very adamant about how much of a\u00a0hero Chris Hansen is. But at the same time, TikTok is full of child exploitation that is accepted. It\u2019s people monetising their children. The cognitive dissonance in society regarding what the best way is to protect children and the best way to call out child predators is fascinating, and I\u00a0think a\u00a0lot of that is to do with the boundary between justice and the law. The line between criminal enterprise and entertainment has become so fragile. It started many, many years ago, from the birth of live television. This has become an industry within itself. I\u00a0think that that\u2019s part of the reason Primetime<\/i> is arriving at an interesting moment. There\u2019s still a\u00a0conversation that people don\u2019t really know how to have, because, yeah, fundamentally Chris Hansen\u2019s mission is a\u00a0noble one. But when you\u2019re asking, how, every week do we beat that? How do we build on that? How do we get more viewers every week? It\u2019s like inevitably you have to scale with these things. And that\u2019s where the darkness is.<\/p>\n In\u00a0<\/strong>Primetime<\/strong><\/i>, we see these people that have built very, very controlled environments where they\u2019re able to thrive, and then we\u2019re waiting for all that to collapse in on itself. Which leads to Elizabeth Holmes and the other film you\u2019ve made,\u00a0<\/strong>You Can See Everything<\/strong><\/i>. It feels like there is a\u00a0thematic overlap.<\/strong><\/p>\n Well, it\u2019s funny. I\u00a0mean, so <\/span>You Can See Everything<\/span><\/i> started four years ago. It had been going on for a\u00a0really long time.\u00a0<\/span>Primetime<\/i> came midway through.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Oh wow, so you were already deep in it by\u00a0then?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n I was deep into <\/span>You Can See Everything<\/span><\/i> for years. Nathan Fielder, myself, David Boland who shot\u00a0<\/span>Primetime<\/i>, Ari Balouzian, my composer who did <\/span>Some Kind of Heaven<\/span><\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>Spermworld<\/i>,\u00a0<\/span>Ren Faire,<\/i>\u00a0<\/span>Primetime<\/i>. Christian Vasquez, my producer\u2026 The same crew essentially was making both films at the same time, but we started <\/span>You Can See Everything<\/span><\/i> years ago. We started it while I\u00a0was in the edit on\u00a0<\/span>Ren Faire<\/i> and\u00a0<\/span>Spermworld<\/i>. So it\u2019s been happening for forever. But it\u2019s a\u00a0very different thing. It\u2019s one of those movies where the more I\u00a0say anything about it or skew your perception of it, the more it will become a\u00a0less fun experience. And I\u00a0still haven\u2019t really made up my mind about what the film is, what actually happened there. Nathan and I\u00a0will always have different opinions about different moments, which is why we felt like it was really strong. But the experience of constructing and filming that movie was different to anything else I\u2019ve\u00a0done.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For Nathan and I\u00a0it was very important to us that\u00a0<\/span>You Can See Everything\u00a0<\/i>was the closest thing that either of us had ever made to a\u00a0very rigorous documentary, just like going back to the original tenets of documentary filmmaking. It was us trying to make something that really felt like a\u00a0hopefully a\u00a0verit\u00e9 film like Frederick Wiseman would make,\u00a0<\/span>Salesman<\/i> by the Maysles brothers\u2026 there\u2019s a\u00a0lot of movies we would talk about. A\u00a0lot. It was also one of those things, too, where you can\u2019t really have any references for what was going on. We just had to be curious and respond to things happening.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\nGet more Little White\u00a0Lies<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n