Blurring–or rather smudging–the lines between hunter and hunted, predator and prey, exploiter and exploited, director Lance Oppenheim’s “Primetime” derives its deliciously devilish thrills through emphasizing contrast. Whether it is imbuing spiritual weight to the earthiness of its story, oversaturating its ordinary compositions with piercing, revealing light, or contrasting a histrionic performance from an unhinged Robert Pattinson–who plays “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen–against an actor in a more understated register, the film exists in that uncanny valley between myth and unreality. Even the very concept of Hansen’s show, wherein he and his team would draw potential child molesters out, where he would then confront them and force them to confess to their twisted desires, feels incredulous that it was ever on air, and also par for the course for a nation that regularly resorts to spectacle and entertainment when it comes to trying to process sin and vice.
Straightforward as it may be in telling its story about the rise of Hansen’s show, the boundaries he pushed in the pursuit of higher ratings (“I’m gonna be bigger than “Lost!” he ambitiously exclaims to his producer, Andie [Merritt Wever]), and the show’s subsequent cancellation after an exposure gone wrong, its simplicity is complicated through how Oppenheim imbues a metaphysical heft into its narrative. “You’re cleansing the world of an ancient evil,” Hansen tells his protégé, Dan Plum (Skyler Gisondo), an actor hired as a decoy to lure out the potential predators. Indeed, Hansen exists somewhere between a wolf in sheep’s clothing and a false prophet, framing his show as righteous when, in reality, he sees it as a way to gain more notoriety and power.
For Oppenheim, this tension is something he was excited to explore in his first feature film, after a string of successful documentaries. “There’s something so interesting and maybe somewhat tragic about the concept of a person who has essentially embraced the cultural lore around himself,” he shared.
With “Primetime” breaking out at the box office, introducing Hansen to a whole new host of viewers, Oppenheim, Wever, and Gisondo spoke with RogerEbert.com over Zoom before the film’s premiere in New York; this piece combines their interviews into one fluid conversation. They discussed the film’s unique spiritual temperament, chewing gum, child actors, and whether it is ever possible to truly offer help on the other side of a camera.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Merritt, one piece of audio that “Primetime” highlights is your voracious gum chewing. Tell me more about how that action helped you, if at all, understand Andie better?
Merritt Wever: I went through a hundred packs of whatever was sugar-free, but I definitely chewed so much that by the end of the day I was getting nauseous. That had a part of a storyline that I don’t think ended up making it into the film, but it was this idea that Andie was trying to be a better person and quit smoking. The Nicorette gum that she was chewing was to help her keep on the straight and narrow, but in the same way other characters made compromises and strayed, at one point there was an idea that by the end of the movie, she makes a specific choice to not make a change and goes back to being a smoker.
You’re not the first person to bring up gum chewing, though, which is making me wonder if A24 is pushing that as a talking point or if people are honestly responding to the smacking.
(Laughs) I was genuinely curious; I feel like it must have helped you tap into the physicality of Andie in a way.
It was helpful; it was something she could do when she was getting excited about something. She becomes animal- or monster-esque when she’s watching the stings go down. This movie has a lot to do with who’s the monster? Where’s the monster? They’re chasing a supposed monster out there outside of themselves, but these characters reveal themselves to have their own monsters inside them. So I think when we’re talking about the gnashing of the teeth in a movie that also has wolves and those kinds of elements, I wonder if this kind of chewing physicality lies within that world.
I’m thinking about what you shared during the Venice press conference where, before “Primetime,” you were “coming off a string of parts where I was playing people who really cared a lot about the right things, used a certain part of their heart over and over, and that part of my heart had kind of run dry.” What were these characters from past projects demanding of you and what made Andie feel cathartic?
MW: I think leading up to Lance’s film, the characters I played in some of those projects were incredibly compassionate or empathetic. They cared about the right things and loved people. I think using the same part of your heart repeatedly can wear it to the nub, and I found that when other parts came that would ask me to use that part of my heart, I felt like there was nothing left. I needed to regrow and generate that, which ironically meant jumping to a different register.
Andie is not using that part of her heart. If anything, there’s something slightly masochistic about her. She likes swimming in these waters. When the script came my way, it was still in flux, but the shape of the character never changed, which is that she’s a person who does a very specific kind of job with a specific kind of man, and she’s offered the opportunity to change her life and make a different choice, and she decides not to. She decides to double down on this way of life and embraces the material.
Lance and I played at different times with getting very explicit in the script about why she chose to double down, why she made her choice, but I think he wisely decided that the film did not need that. What I hope is that when people see the character, they feel like it makes sense and they can track how she made her decision, regardless of how explicit we ended up being.
I think what strikes me about your character is not that she’s necessarily less of a sociopath than Chris, but that her reach is far more limited.
MW: Yeah, at the end of the day, she has more responsibility, but less power. With her, I tried to play into the reality of cycles of harm. Hurt people hurt people, yes, but she’s not even treated as a person at times. She’s very much like a dog that is kicked at certain times by Chris, and she turns around and kicks the nearest dog around her, whether it is the so-called predators or Xavier Von Erck.
It’s not explicit in the story, but I remember talking to Lance early on and saying, “An interesting element here is that a lot of people who prey on children or who attempt to engage with children in this way are people who had that done to them when they were children.” In the limited amount of real estate I had, I might have been trying to bring this cyclical idea of harm, how violence gets passed down, that when you’re treated a certain way, that’s sometimes all you know and that’s how you choose to treat others.
Well, in one sequence where you get to throw it back to Chris is in that beat towards the end–which has garnered a lot of reactions–where you brutally enunciate the line “I will call the network, motherfucker.”
MW: Interestingly, you talk about the response to that scene because at the time we are chatting, I’ve only seen the film once at Venice, and that’s a very specific audience. It is why I’m excited to see the film tonight because I’ll be watching it with an audience in the US that has a very particular media and culture diet that is different from when I first watched it.
It feels like we shot a lot of different versions of Andie, because that’s Lance’s discovery process. When filming wrapped, I thought, “I’m not going to know who Andie ends up being until I see the final cut.” That is new for me; it felt like I was meeting her for the first time when I saw the film. Hearing people respond or gravitate towards anything I did to embody her is enlightening because I’m still in the process of being introduced to her.
Skyler, also at the Venice Press conference, there was an astute observation made that the coterie is composed of many former child actors, including Alex Winter, Jonathan Lipnicki, and, of course, yourself and Pattinson. Was this something that you clocked yourself or talked with Lance about in regard to what you might bring in from your own experience as a child actor onto this set?
Skyler Gisondo: So much of Dan’s journey as this aspiring young actor was easy to latch onto. There was that kind of quiet desperation of not being able to betray how badly you want this thing, and also the eagerness, a desire to express just how grateful he is for an opportunity, and the quickness to compartmentalize if anything doesn’t feel great, that felt relatable. I also remember the experience of being young and working with an actor you idolize, and that person feels ten feet tall, and you can’t even believe you are breathing the same air as them, let alone doing a scene with them. With Dan’s relationship with Chris, there’s so much of that. He’s just in awe of Chris and everything that he has.
I’m thinking now about the scene where Andie tells Dan, “We’re going to shoot the rehearsal.” Lance and David Bolen loved to keep things alive and discover things in the moment, coming from the doc world. So there were many moments where we did not rehearse. That scene had so many moving pieces. Lance had this vision of me coming in with the wind, as if I was coming in from some kind of storm. Merritt and I knew we had to hit this mark, but there were still a couple of beats of silence because there were moving parts. So I said, “Do we have time for a rehearsal?” and she was so dialed in to character that she said, “We’re going to shoot the rehearsal.” In a lot of these scenes, Dan’s incredulousness mirrored my own in a way that was helpful whenever I was completely surprised or just by a decision. If I ever was aware I was not an actor anymore, I could channel that.
I’ve heard you speak about how in Hollywood, if you break out doing one type of movie, you’re often typecast. It mirrored a lot of the struggle Chris was feeling at the start of the film about his work not being taken seriously, feeling like “To Catch a Predator” was stuck in a kind of limbo.
SG: As an actor, he’s so much out of your control. You just wait a lot; you spend a lot of time waiting for the phone to ring. I never thought about how a lot of the work I did prior to this was comedy; I just saw them as great opportunities to work with great people, and I wanted to leap at those opportunities. I don’t think I quite realized how big of a departure “Primetime” would be for me until I did it. I didn’t think I could do it, but Lance just had this unwavering belief that fueled my own confidence. Rob, being at the level he was at and yet still being willing to take swings and being so incredibly alive- that’s the kind of MO I want for myself going forth.
You’ve spoken about encountering Chris Hansen through memes and recreations. I think there’s a meta element to that when Dan adopts Hansen’s mannerisms. Tell me more about where you see that sequence fitting into this idea of meme-ification of someone like Chris. You’re, in essence, copying Rob’s impersonation of Chris Hansen.
SG: It’s crazy now to think on the page; it was not evident to me that Dan would also be doing the voice. It was clear that he was trying to take control in the way that Chris would, and I think that’s what unites these various “recreations,” this idea of wanting to grasp at control. I remember going to set, and it occurred to me that it could be a fun idea to mimic not necessarily Chris’ voice, but Rob’s impersonation of his voice. Rob was on set, and I flagged him down, and he was so excited by the idea and so generous with his time. I just asked him to read all of the lines in his voice, and so I was able to work with him on getting the sound down.
Merritt, you’ve spoken about this film being a curious period piece, and that the show came out at a time when the show predates a world where we had the internet on our phones. As someone who is in the public sphere, whose images and words can be manipulated and taken out of context, I’m curious about how the film’s ideas land for you when everything is threatened with virality.
MW: I have been very lucky professionally to be someone who’s able, sometimes more than others, to continue working without being particularly public.
That may shift for you in a couple of weeks’ time, though.
MW: I don’t know about the shift, but I do know that I’m trying to participate. I’m trying to be a player and be a good sport. So this is a question for almost two weeks from now (Laughs).
I’m curious what younger generations think of this film. The internet is something different now than it was when the show took place, particularly due to its accessibility. To have not just a camera in your pocket but your phone where you can upload and access those images … it is different to grow up in a world where you have to acknowledge that every time you leave your house, you could record someone or someone could record you.
In “Primetime,” people are trying to record other people’s supposedly worst actions and thoughts and desires and deeds. It very much explores what happens when media, the news, and law enforcement collide with human beings. But nowadays, it’s become second nature to turn the camera on ourselves and offer the public our own worst moments. It’s interesting: we don’t just share the best of ourselves with these little handheld cameras. We seem driven to also share the worst.
Lance, I want to ask about the spiritual register of this film. There’s, of course, a reference to the kind of demonic force Hansen encounters in India, which you bring to life. But I also think about how you and David Bolen frame the film’s opening moments, where Tony Revolori’s character falls prostrate before Hansen, as if he’s in a kind of twisted form of confession where Pattinson is playing a priest. Tell me more about the intentionality of that framing.
Lance Oppenheim: When you watch “To Catch a Predator,” especially the raw footage, it feels like everything you’re seeing is beamed from Mars, a different planet. These objects that seem so familiar, whether it is sweet tea, pepperoni pizza, or cookies … these ubiquitous items that could be from anywhere in the US, something feels off about them. As you said, these objects take on a doomed or spiritual significance. They have a lot of weight for people who enter the house, and essentially they leave the house with their lives having ended. You can watch the show and witness a series of little deaths. You see the life leave people’s eyes when they’re discovered on television.
In that regard, I was thinking about Chris Hansen as an archangel, or this spiritual figure who occupies this position of moral superiority. He’s tying himself to something ancient.
I like that he’s almost unaware of it in the movie, but something is happening to him. The more he does this show, the more spiritually something is changing inside of him and is, in some ways, being robbed of him. He’s entered into a Faustian bargain he isn’t even aware that he’s made.
I talked a lot about this with Rob, but the bracelet he wears in that film and then gives to Dan was our version of the ring of power in “The Lord of the Rings.” If you think about Frodo trying to throw the ring into Mount Doom at the end, that’s in part what I was drawing from too: this kind of operatic epic of mythological proportions. To use that as a touchpoint seemed very fitting for a person like Hansen, who has turned himself into a myth, meme, and has occupied for almost thirty years a lot of attention online and culturally.
I know that the “whale” Hansen references in the film is a gambling term, but it did make me think about the story of Jonah: how, in running away from Nineveh, he was swallowed by a big fish, yes, and perhaps looked at differently, was consumed by the enormity of what he was avoiding.
LO: I love that. One of my favorite movies of all time is Nicholas Ray’s “Bigger Than Life,” and that movie is essentially the book of Job. Chris is never dealing with one crisis at a time. That’s why the film includes things like this extramarital affair. Well before the events of the movie start, he’s doomed. He has already made decisions that are somewhat irrelevant to what he’s doing with his show. Yet because he is setting such a high moral standard for everything, he has to also be held to that. As he says in the film, “A man should be held accountable for the decisions he makes.
I liked this idea of seeing the media culture around him attempting to snipe him and employ the same tricks that he does to other people, whether or not it’s justified. He even says, “This person I’m having this affair with is thirty years old …why are you coming at me with this?” I was fascinated by this idea that we could inhabit a time where I felt like the tabloid culture was nastier.
Skyler, I want to turn the spiritual register question to you because it’s not lost on me that you’re stepping into this role after having played Gideon in “The Righteous Gemstones.” It feels like the fear-mongering, the language of spiritual warfare Hansen adopts, can be attributed in part to the rhetoric of megachurch pastors too.
SG: That’s an interesting point. I think for Dan, in regard to his own spiritual life insofar as it exists in “Primetime,” there is no higher good–and perhaps no higher God–than his desire to be taken seriously as an actor. Rob and Lance have told me a version of the following line: “There used to be a pillory in every town and now there’s a television set in every home, and you’re on it and so am I.” So much of the movie for Dan is his relationship to wanting something so badly that he’s wanted for so long and it’s so close, but he has to reconcile with this idea that he’s doing this uncomfortable thing. This is not acting for him, but something else entirely because whether he’s comfortable about it or not, he is an arbiter and is doling out punishment.
Lance, you’ve said that artistically, you are drawn to people obsessed with fantasies and those who end up becoming entombed by them. That was true most recently for “Ren Faire” and dovetails well with this pair of projects you have coming out in “Primetime” and “You Can See Everything.” Why do you keep coming back to the well of this theme?
LO: I think a part of it is at least the fact that my parents are both real estate attorneys, and during the recession, I remember they were representing people whose homes were being foreclosed on. One of the people they were working with lived in a garage with all of their prized possessions, and they didn’t want to part ways with them. That really stuck with me as a kid, wanting to be buried with your things.
I have ambitions as a filmmaker, and I feel constantly defined by, in some ways, my ambition, and I hate that about myself. I find it in a weird way when I make these movies, especially this one, there’s obviously parts of myself that are in it. When I think of Chris Hansen, and I think about the Cameo that my wife had gotten me from him in 2024, well before I ever received a script. The feeling I had was like, “This is a guy who started as an investigative journalist in the mold of Mike Wallace, and yet now you could pay him $30, and he’ll pretend that you’re a potential predator and he’ll wish you a happy birthday.” While he’s doing that, he’s still doing investigations into this extremely serious subject. There’s something so interesting and maybe somewhat tragic about the concept of a person who has essentially embraced the cultural lore around himself. He’s so hyper-aware of it, and all of the work he does is absorbed into this hyper-performative version of himself. The man has become a meme; the person has become a persona.
He has lost some part of himself potentially in doing this work and spending so much time enshrouded in darkness. He’s spent more time doing that than spending time with his family; that’s the work of an enterprise journalist. You’re constantly on the road, you’re gone all the time … I was drawn to this idea of following the breadcrumbs of that feeling, and trying to depict that in interesting ways.
I like the idea that the world of the show felt closer to family to him. His spending time with Dan, his “fake son,” felt more real than the time he spent with his real children. His home feels even more artificial than the world of the show when he has this elaborate apparatus set up. With “You Can See Everything,” there are similar ideas, and part of what I hope to communicate when people see it is this idea of surprise. Nathan and I made this movie in secrecy, and we wanted people to have this experience where they had no context at all for what they were watching. The same cinematographer shot both films, and the composer worked on it too. There’s a level of immersion we’re striving for, where the people watching it would have the same feelings we had making it, being in the room, observing everything.
Your film has made me wonder about whether it’s possible to be free from the entrapment of a system you still participate in. As a documentary filmmaker, I’m wondering if you find yourself asking the same haunting line that closes the film: “What would have happened if I wasn’t there?”
I think about The Journalist and the Murderer, which is largely about the kind of vampiric relationship that exists in non-fiction storytelling. There was something therapeutic about seeing the kind of media culture of the time. There’s a war that was going on that was really confusing and people didn’t know why we were in it. The perfect receptacle came their way in the midst of that confusion, which was in the form of this television show. We’re in a time now where it feels like we’re in another war that’s really confusing, and that rage is still there; it hasn’t gone away, and Chris Hansen hasn’t gone away either.
He’s still doing the same show in a different context. Millions of people are doing it all the time with their phones. So when I think about that final line … in the context of the movie, I feel like there’s a multifaceted dimension to it. Critically, I didn’t want to end the movie with just that line but with Dan getting his card. It feels like this pyrrhic victory. He has achieved everything he’s ever dreamt of, but at what cost? It felt like a classic ode to some of the movies that I thought so much about when I was making this, whether it’s “Ace in the Hole” or “A Face in the Crowd” or “Demon Lover.”
As a documentary filmmaker, I definitely experience that question on an everyday basis. I remember when I was working on “Some Kind of Heaven,” I remember thinking of Reggie Kincer, who I am still very close with, and how he was doing psychedelics and prioritizing this alternate way of existing inside a very constructed universe there. I kept thinking, “Is the camera’s presence affecting him? Is it motivating him to be on psychedelics?” I remember there were a lot of times where we would put the camera aside and just talk with Anne, his wife, just to be like, “Are we helping or are we hurting? Should we get out of here? Or is there a path to catharsis in some way?” There’s something I selfishly love about the experience of making films, and I love being, especially with documentaries, being in worlds that I’m an alien invader in. I love when I don’t have any reason to be in a space, and yet I have to be hyper-present to get to know people and hopefully capture a truth that is essential, and that can speak to something that is a profound human drama.
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