Before “Primetime” director Lance Oppenheim saw formative films like Abbas Kiarostami’s “Close-Up” or Orson Welles’ “F for Fake,” in which cinema masters blur the line between fiction and reality, he watched “To Catch a Predator.”
“I remember thinking, ‘What am I looking at? Is this a documentary? Is this a scripted film? Is this something new, something different?” Oppenheim said of the news program that lured child predators into homes with hidden cameras while TV reporter Chris Hansen waited in the wings to confront the unsuspecting attackers. “I couldn’t tell if it was like a prank show, a horror movie or a news program.”
For a documentary filmmaker, who has filmed nonfiction subjects (“Ren Faire,” “Spermworld,” “Some Kind of Heaven” and Nathan Fielder’s upcoming film “You Can See Everything”) as if they were scripted narrative films, “Primetime,” starring Robert Pattinson as Hansen during the rise and fall of “To Catch a Predator,” became the perfect project. This gave the young author the opportunity to blur the line between fiction and reality on the scripted side of the equation.
Oppenheim was able to understand how the news program created, in his words, “this manufactured reality,” where adult actors pretended to be children, houses that looked like sets (some reminding Oppenheim of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”), and “props that looked like cookies and pepperoni pizza and sweet tea, which took on this feeling of dread.” This was a manufactured reality that would then collide with the “hyperreal situation” of a potential predator entering to attempt something terrible.
“Hansen had created this space and this world where time seemed to freeze, and the laws of gravity and physics and reality would be a little different; it was almost like the zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker,'” Oppenheim said. “I liked the challenge of trying to express that through visual and cinematic terms.”
The result is a film radically different from anything we’ve seen on the big screen in recent years, which was the filmmaker’s stated intention. Here are four ways Oppenheim and his longtime cinematographer David Bolen achieved this distinctive look.
Multiple formats
Oppenheim wanted to instill in his audience the same “What am I looking at?” » feeling that he had experienced with the original series. To achieve this, Bolen used 12 different camera formats, including mini-DVs (many of which mirrored Hansen’s hidden cameras), vintage tube and broadcast cameras, a micro endoscope used for colonoscopies, as well as a more standard modern camera (Arri Alexa 35).
The goal, according to Oppenheim, was to create an “elastic aesthetic value system,” in which they could shoot with an Arri Alexa 35 and then do another take with a radically different camera, which, Oppenheim admits, confused some members of his team.
“I think a lot of people thought I was like Tommy Wiseau on the set of ‘The Room,’ not knowing what I was doing and making choices that were a little arbitrary,” Oppenheim said. “I love Tommy Wiseau, and I love the way he directed ‘The Room,’ so I was like, ‘I don’t care. I’ll shoot the scene once on an Alexa, and then do it again on a broken Plumecon tube camera.'”
Plumecon: an image that is collapsing
Oppenheim consulted with veteran television cameraman Mitchell Wagenberg, who worked on the original “To Catch a Predator,” “Cash Cab” and on traditional news programs with television reporters like “60 Minutes” Mike Wallace. Oppenheim wasn’t just trying to learn how the shows were filmed; he was also looking for new emotional and narrative brushstrokes.
Although much has been made of the novelty of the medical colonoscopy camera, it was Wagenberg who introduced the Plumbicon to the “Primetime” team that changed the game. It was an early attempt at a digital camera, used briefly by Wagenberg and others on news programs in the late 1980s before being abandoned.
“It was this antiquated technology where the tubes inside the camera were physically heated, like in a microwave, until they produced an image,” Oppenheim explained.
Oppenheim was intrigued, desperate to better understand this long-vanished technology, and decided to find and acquire one that he could possibly use in the film.
“The Plumecon we found, the tubes had been burned, so every time we turned the camera on, it distorted the images. It almost looked like a nuclear explosion had been set off right in front of us, and I loved that. It reminded me of (Werner) Herzog’s quote, ‘As soon as you turn the camera on, you see fiction’ (and) the camera felt like it honored that spirit.”
Oppenheim admits that when shooting with the Plumecon, he had no idea how the image would hold up, but he also liked the idea that the image might “fall apart a little bit.”
Describing his Plumecon brushwork, Oppenheim said: “The colors bleed and drip all sorts, and they’re kind of funny, and it seems a little dreamlike. »
Printing up to 16mm
All images, regardless of camera format used, were printed on 16mm film and then scanned for editing. The reasons for this situation and the results obtained are threefold.
“With the cinema camera (images shot on) Alexa, Dave and I have always been kind of allergic to the digital look and the sharpness of the rendering,” Oppenheim said. “(The 16mm scan) was an effort to make Alexa images tactile.”
Oppenheim also appreciated the layer of suppression provided by scanning between the audience and the original image. It was inspired by a leaked version of director Lynne Ramsay and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey’s 2025 film, “Die My Love,” starring Pattinson.
“A cam-scan version came out of ‘Die My Love,’ and that movie was shot on Ektachrome, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s so crazy, just what it looks like,'” Oppenheim said. “Obviously when the movie came out it was even more beautiful, but there was something about that high contact, almost like being a little removed from it, that was interesting.”
Oppenheim also wanted to honor and expressively capture the fact that “To Catch a Predator” only exists online today, and how analytics allowed him to create an expressive language of the Internet.
“(‘To Catch a Predator’) doesn’t exist on DVD, Blu-ray, all we really have are these 360p and 480p versions that have apparently been digitized by someone else. So we’re looking at something that has essentially been reprinted twice. The audience is interacting with an object that has been digitized, that has been corrupted in some way. I liked conceptually that it rhymes with what we were doing with this kind of lyrical, heightened portrait of Chris Hansen, the Internet version of Chris Hansen.
Color and the colorist
As “Primetime” lays bare the dangers of reality and the new shows of the 2000s, Oppenheim said he still enjoys watching reality TV, but like many, the 30-year-old director is nostalgic for the television of his youth.
“What’s a little depressing about the news when I look at it (today), aesthetically, everything is grayscale and there’s no color anymore. When you were watching things in the 2000s, especially in 2006, you would turn on any program, like ‘What would you do?’ With John Quiñones,” and the colors were so saturated, almost pastel.”
While Oppenheim’s cinematic references for “Primetime” are works by Billy Wilder, Oliver Stone, Tarkovsky and many canon films from cinema history, Oppenheim explained that he wanted to capture the color saturation and feel of the television he was consuming around the time of “The Catch a Predator.”
“I grew up with these TV shows and these network shows like ‘The OC’ and ‘Smallville,’ and I wanted those things to come into the film in an aesthetic way.”
One reason Bolen and Oppenheim felt comfortable with their bold experiments creating the collapsing images of “Primetime” was that their longtime colorist, Damien Vandercruyssen, was in charge. Vandercruyssen not only orchestrated how Bolen’s fragile tube camera image, 16mm scans, and inventive cinematography would come together, he simultaneously brought out the vivid colors and tactile quality that Oppenheim associated with images from that era.
“He’s an artist and we couldn’t have done it without him,” Oppenheim said of Vandercruyssen. “(Damian) did such a crazy job; he’s the essential piece of the collaboration with David. What he did with that in the scanning process and creating this really tactile image – he’s a master.”
Gn entert
