To direct one movie that is on everyone’s lips in awards season is remarkable. To make two begins to look like sorcery. That is the position in which the 30-year-old Florida-born film-maker Lance Oppenheim now finds himself.
Next month brings the release of You Can See Everything, the three-hour documentary which he co-directed with faux-naif deadpan prankster Nathan Fielder, in which they spend a month living with the disgraced health-tech mogul Elizabeth Holmes before she begins her 11-year prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy. The film, described by Oppenheim as “head-spinning” and so shrouded in secrecy that Variety magazine’s list of Oscar predictions identifies one of its cast members only as “[Redacted]”, is expected to become the first documentary nominated for best picture. When I meet Oppenheim in a London hotel, it is to discuss his other hot ticket, Primetime, for which Robert Pattinson is the one attracting Oscar buzz.
The Batman actor gives a high-wire performance as Chris Hansen, the sensationalist US television vigilante renowned for ambushing paedophiles on To Catch a Predator, which was a disreputable and highly addictive segment of the current affairs show Dateline NBC between 2004 and 2007. Hansen later parlayed the idea, and his crusading shtick, into a succession of spin-offs. Some, including Hansen Vs Predators, had the same sleazy catnip quality.
Others, such as a sting to collar bicycle thieves, did not. The format of To Catch a Predator is simple. A volunteer from the website Perverted-Justice enters an online chatroom pretending to be underage.
Once a paedophile takes the bait, chats with the supposed teen and then pitches up at the agreed location (which is in fact a “sting house” rigged with cameras), he is met by an actor posing as the adolescent. Suddenly, Hansen slinks out of the shadows and calmly invites the offender to “have a seat,” an offer which quickly became his catchphrase. He then reads aloud excerpts from the incriminating online chat as the guilty party squirms and panics.
Reality television this may be, but it is also a theatrical performance with its own unvarying props from one sting to the next: cookies and pizza the pre-sex snacks, a table or kitchen island Hansen’s equivalent of a CEO’s desk or judge’s bench. You’re seeing this horrific situation where someone who’s sick in the head has shown up to do a terrible thing. Then they’re confronted by Chris Hansen, who has these catchphrases and one-liners.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
