Lance Oppenheim: Two Awards-Season Hits at 30 — SkimNews
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- Lance Oppenheim, a 30-year-old Florida-born filmmaker, has two of the year's buzziest awards-season films: the Robert Pattinson starrer Primetime and the Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, which Variety's Oscar predictions identify by redacting one cast member
- You Can See Everything is a three-hour documentary co-directed with Nathan Fielder that follows Elizabeth Holmes during the month before she began serving an 11-year prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy, and is expected to become the first documentary nominated for best picture
- Primetime stars Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, whose Dateline NBC segment To Catch a Predator ran from 2004 to 2007 and confronted online predators who arrived at a rigged "sting house" expecting to meet an underage decoy
- Chris Hansen publicly attacked the film as deploying "weaponised empathy" and portraying him as "ratings-obsessed, maniacal people," while simultaneously booking trailers for his own TruBlu true-crime streaming platform to run immediately before US screenings
- Pattinson, already a diehard Hansen fan, originally brought the project to Oppenheim intending only to produce before Oppenheim convinced him to take the lead, drawing a parallel between Hansen's overnight fame and Pattinson's own 2008 Twilight-era Comic-Con debut
- Oppenheim likens To Catch a Predator's reality-bending format — actors playing children, a house dressed like a Blue Velvet set — to Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up and Orson Welles's F for Fake, crediting the show with shaping his documentary sensibility
Why it matters: Chris Hansen attacked Primetime as "weaponised empathy" while booking trailers for his own TruBlu streaming platform to run before US screenings — a dual posture Oppenheim called "on a par with what we've seen of him on television." The real-life subject is now unwittingly performing the theatricality the biopic dramatizes, turning his opposition into a marketing channel that effectively makes him co-author of his own portrayal.
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