"Stranger Than Strange": How Lance Oppenheim Made Two Buzzy Films of the Year

Primetime and You Can See Everything are both bold awards contenders that challenge the sense of reality. Ahead of the release of his drama starring Robert Pattinson as a TV watchman, the 30-year-old director talks about crime, punishment and South Park, making directing two films that are on everyone's lips this awards season seem like magic. This is the position of Lance Oppenheim, the 30-year-old filmmaker born in Florida.

Directing a film that is on everyone's lips during awards season is remarkable. Making two is like magic. That's where 30-year-old Florida-born filmmaker Lance Oppenheim now finds himself. Next month sees the release of a three-hour documentary he co-directed with prankster Nathan Fielder, in which he spends a month living with health-tech mogul Elizabeth Holmes before she begins an 11-year sentence for fraud and conspiracy. Described by Oppenheim as "wandering" and so secretive that Variety magazine's list of Oscar predictions lists one of its cast members only as "[Redacted]," the film is expected to be the first Best Picture nominee.

When I meet Oppenheim in a London hotel to discuss his other hot ticket, Primetime, Robert Pattinson is the one getting Oscar buzz. The Batman actor stars as Chris Hansen, a sensational American TV vigilante famous for stalking pedophiles on To Catch a Predator, an infamous and highly addictive episode of NBC's Dateline between 2004 and 2007. The spin-offs some of them, including Hansen Vs Predators, had the same quality as the cat inscription. Others, like the Bike Thieves Collar, did not.

The To Catch a Predator format involves a volunteer from the Perverted-Justice website entering an online chat room and pretending to be underage. When a pedophile takes the bait, chats with the supposed teen, and then arrives at the agreed-upon location (which is actually a camera-equipped "sting house"), he is confronted by an actor posing as a teen. Suddenly, Hansen steps out of the shadows and calmly invites the criminal to "have a seat," a suggestion that quickly becomes his catchphrase. He then reads aloud an excerpt from the incriminating online chat, causing the offender to cringe and panic. Reality TV may be like that, but it's also a theatrical performance that has its own quirks from bite to bite: cookies and pizza, pre-sex snacks, the kitchen island equivalent of the CEO's desk or Judge Hansen's bench.

“The show is very strange in tone,” Oppenheim marvels. You feel like an alien object was thrown in from Mars. You are looking at this horrible situation where a person who is sick in the head has shown that he is doing something horrible. Then they meet Chris Hansen, who has these catchphrases and one-liners. He's a crime stopper, but he's also out to make a sleazy, sleazy TV show. Making me laugh was about how to make something even weirder than the story.

Personally, you'd never choose this box boy for a roving A24 writer whose fan club includes Ari Astaire, Darren Aronofsky and the Safadi brothers. In fact, you might think twice before serving alcohol, at least without an ID. Her mini pompadour gives her an Eraserhead Jr look. His black, round-rimmed glasses may have been slapped on his face by a classmate. A black and white striped shirt worn under his suit jacket gives him the look of a well-dressed homie.

Although, in fact, Primetime is Oppenheim's first non-documentary film. His 2020 thriller debut, A Kind of Heaven, is set in a Florida retirement community where happiness turns cruel and cruel. Its 2024 follow-up, Spermworld, delves into the private lives of men who donate sperm, including one who has fathered more than a hundred children.

"I always wanted my documentaries to be like Hollywood dramas," explains the director. With Prime Time, I was curious what it would be like to make a real Hollywood drama with actors. The resulting character study is about as much as Ren Faire, Oppenheim's 2024 HBO masterpiece, featuring a mercurial, Viagra-fueled theme park tyrant, backstabbing underlings and a giant talking lizard.

The filmmaker himself was introduced to Chris Hansen as a child when he saw him in a spoofed episode of South Park, in which Cartman is strong-armed by the host to appear in a TV special about Tourette syndrome. A group of pedophiles unwittingly save him by shooting themselves. From there, Oppenheim became interested in To Catch a Predator and its derivatives. A few years ago, his girlfriend (now wife) even bought him a personalized Cameo video message from Hansen. He now steps forward to play it for me on his phone. In the video, the silver-haired pedophile hunter cheekily invites Oppenheim to "have a seat...not that I doubt you that I doubt anything like hunters," before airing his upcoming shows.

It's this confusion between righteous avenger and clever huckster that makes Hansen such an irresistible subject. "I think he started out with great intentions, but he turned serious reporting into entertainment and willingly turned himself into a meme. In Cameo, he presents what he does as a service that you can pay for; then he puts his whole project into this moral catalog where he talks about good and bad. When you think you're doing something that makes you a super good world. What happens to you?" "And now we have the guy playing Batman in Chris Hansen," he grins.

It was Pattinson, already a die-hard Hansen fan, who brought the project to Oppenheim, intending only to produce rather than star in it. "Rob is probably the actor of our time," says the director. "Every film he's made this year has been a defining cultural moment." Primetime follows the drama, his spiky black comedy with Zendaya, and The Odyssey. Dune: Part Three arrives in December. “As I got to know him, you get the sense that he has stitched the very human and vulnerable parts of himself into Primetime. When Rob went to Comic-Con in 2008 with Twilight, he became an overnight celebrity. That's part of what Chris Hansen goes through in the movie."

Primetime's special alchemy is that it presents Hansen's story in the stylized style of To Catch a Predator, so that we are simultaneously inside the show, with its thrilling moral uproar, and outside, watching in abject, impotent horror. "It's not a biopic," says Oppenheim. I wanted it to be experiential and imaginative. I wanted to know what would happen if you took Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, Oliver Stone's JFK, and Brian De Palma's Body Double, then threw them into a blender with the actual events of To Catch a Predator. Does it taste weird or delicious? Maybe you sprinkle some monster sexiness in there, too, and it's like, "Boom!"

Boom, indeed. Hansen, who is deeply upset about not being consulted or even informed about the film, has accused Primetime of "gun-slinging sympathy", "making audiences fear predators" and portraying him and his staff "as ratings-obsessed lunatics". On the other hand, he has eagerly infused himself into the Primetime experience, booking trailers for his own true-crime streaming platform, TruBlu, to run immediately before the film hits US theaters.

Oppenheim is full of admiration. "The way he's created a media circus around his reaction to the film is on par with what we've seen of him on TV. He's got a lot going for him. He's a journalist, but also an entertainer, a ringleader and maybe a compulsive performer." Is there a parallel with the current president of the United States? "Well, they were on TV at about the same time, and they were both on shows that were created or greenlit by Jeff Zucker, who stars in the movie himself." However, he does not call them kindred spirits.

Perhaps Hansen's character is so intertwined with Oppenheim's own growing sensibility that he can make such an insulting judgment. "I saw Catching the Hunter long before I saw Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up or Orson Welles' F For Fake," he says, referring to two films in which documentary and drama form an unstable concoction. "But I feel like this show has a lot in common with them, because it's a true reality. It's a short adult cast pretending to be kids in a house that looks like a set of blue velvet." He shakes his head as if reliving the madness of "catch the hunter". "I don't think I would be making non-fiction films the way I do if I hadn't seen that show as a kid."