Primetime: Lance Oppenheim on blurring truth and fiction in Robert Pattinson Chris Hansen thriller

In a 2006 episode of 30 Rock, Liz Lemon is watching news programming when her on-and-off boyfriend Dennis Duffy appears on the TV, holding balloons in his hand.

He comes through the door of a suburban house, and a man dressed in a suit and tie approaches him from the living room and introduces himself, “Good evening, I’m Chris Hansen from Dateline NBC”. Dennis tells Hansen, is here to “boff some chick named Mary”.

Hansen and his Dateline and To Catch a Predator paedophile stings never penetrated the zeitgeist in a culture-defining way in Australia as it did in his native US, but his influence is more far-reaching than you might imagine.

Hansen was a 2000s-era network TV journalist who became famous for stings he and his team would set up to lure online predators into a physical space. Production staff or workers from the watchdog group Perverted Justice would pose as children in chat rooms, and invite the predators to meet them in person, where Hansen and a TV crew would be waiting for them.

Hansen would often say “have a seat” before he laid out all the evidence of the online exchanges, and the men would usually then be arrested by law enforcement who were waiting just out of view.

There was a theatricality to all of it, and the show was, at the time, both hugely popular and also criticised for blurring the line between activism and journalism, and truth and fiction.

Hansen and his exploits are now the subject of a new film, Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson as the host. It’s a wild dramatisation that’s highly stylised and often dream-like, centred on a version of Hansen that doesn’t seem to be part of our world.

That’s because there’s a Hansen who exists as not just a person, but as a pop culture figure, an amalgam of his onscreen persona as distilled through his programs but also in all the parodies, references, that 30 Rock appearance, and even personalised Cameo videos you can buy for $129.

“The real Chris Hansen was like this mythological figure to me,” Primetime director Lance Oppenheim told The Nightly.

“He wasn’t just a TV journalist, he was almost like a god. He was the guy. He was just so iconic. The one-liners he would do reminded me of Tony Montana’s because I loved Scarface as a kid.”

Oppenheim is the wunderkind filmmaker who has two of the year’s buzziest films in release within weeks of each other. Primetime is his first narrative feature, and he is also the co-director of You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes doco.

Oppenheim is only 30 years old, so he was too young to have been that aware of Hansen at his network TV peak, during To Catch a Predator’s 2004 to 2007 run. So, perhaps it’s fitting that Oppenheim’s first exposure to Hansen was not the man himself, but parodies of him on South Park and through comedy website eBaum’s World and sketch troupe The Human Giants.

“I was a huge fan of network TV as a kid. I loved Smallville, The OC, Friends, Joey and Lost. But Chris Hansen, weirdly, is more culturally relevant than any of those shows, which to me felt like the biggest things in life at the time.

“When I was a kid, he felt like a random internet oddity. Only later did I really understand how big the show was at a very specific moment in time.

“Even if Chris Hansen hasn’t become an international figure, or the show didn’t reach different, far reaches of the world, it was parts of what he did, like crime-stopping, and people that are filming themselves on TikTok, trying to catch internet predators. This is directly linked to what Hansen was doing in television, this form of justice in a way.”

Oppenheim’s film features a gonzo, surrealist performance from Pattinson, but also a star-making one from Skyler Gisondo who plays an aspiring actor who is hired to pose as an underage teenage boy during the stings.

There’s something meta-meta-meta about watching a film stage a TV show which staged a lure to catch a paedophile.

“Chris Hansen was a TV news journalist following in the lineage of people like Mike Wallace, and yet he happened upon this format that was very theatrical, very unlike other network news, in this hyper-constructed environment, these house that were turned into movie sets.

“They would be this domestic house on the side of the street, and there would be objects lying around like cookies or tea or pizza. Suddenly, these became symbols of real meaning, and all that artifice would collide with this extremely real high-stakes situation.”

As a kid, Oppenheim was struck by the theatricality of it, and he couldn’t figure out if To Catch a Predator was a prank show, a reality show or a news show, even though it did bring justice in cases where these real people would’ve committed a crime.

It is all of those genres and maybe none of those genres. That meld, turning a serious subject into a sensationalist, commercial TV show is what makes the subject such a compelling one for Primetime.

It also reflects the media and online environment of now, more than two decades after the events depicted in the film.

“These days, you literally can’t tell what’s real or fake,” Oppenheim added. “So, there’s something burned in my brain about all of this stuff from when I was a kid, which then influences so many movies that I made where I’m mixing real and artificial things to get this hyper-subjectivity.

Oppenheim’s background is in documentary filmmaking. But his works including Ren Faire (succession battles at a Renaissance Fair) Some Kind of Heaven (residents at a retirement community) and Spermworld (the stories of sperm donors) are not conventional docs.

Almost all documentaries have a subjectivity, presented through decisions made through editing, production design, or even just the choice to include one person and not the other.

Oppenheim’s approach is not dissimilar to Hansen in that it’s not lies, but a framing of truth, one that’s supported by craft, with a sheen of artifice. There’s truth in every scene and every story, but it’s not absolutely accurate in terms of exactly how it would’ve happened if cameras weren’t there.

It’s the observer effect in quantum physics – the act of observing or measuring something alters the state of that which is being observed.

Oppenheim described his oeuvre as “docufantasia”. “I don’t think I would be making films the way I did if I hadn’t seen To Catch a Predator at that time in my life.

At the time of the interview with Oppenheim, on the ground at the Venice Film Festival where Primetime would premiere two days later, Hansen had not yet seen the film, but he was already publicly agitating against it.

Once Hansen had, he wasn’t a fan. In a feature with Interview magazine, Hansen called it an “offensive” work of fiction. “They are preying upon my name, my image, my likeness to profit,” he added.

Hansen may not like the movie, but he admitted to Interview that he stood to benefit from the renewed interest. For one thing, the personalised Cameo videos he charges costs $129. Three times more than what Oppenheim’s wife paid, $40, two years ago when she organised one for the filmmaker’s birthday.

As you would expect from Hansen, he’s making hay, and promoting his podcasts and online videos, where he is still trying to catch predators.

Pattinson’s version of Hansen feels as about as real as the one Hansen presents, still tap-dancing in a kind of performance.

“It’s hard to say whether he’s ever fully one version of himself,” Oppenheim said. “What Rob did with it is he’s almost doing this conceptual performance where he’s playing every version of Chris Hansen that’s ever existed in media.

“At this point in time, if you see him on Cameo and you pay $50 and he asks you to have a seat just like he did with me to congratulate you on your birthday or something, he has very clearly become so self-aware of this cultural image that exists.

“It was like person to persona, a news show to form of entertainment”.

From To Catch a Predator to Primetime.

Primetime is in cinemas on October 29