Primetime Director Lance Oppenheim Wants You to “Have a Seat”

From 2004 to 2007, Dateline NBC’s To Catch a Predator turned journalist Chris Hansen into a household name. Men who had arranged online meetings with someone they believed to be a teenager would arrive at a suburban house expecting a private encounter, only to find Hansen waiting with printouts of their chat logs and the line that became synonymous with the show: “Have a seat.” The suspects and police were real; the house was staged, the decoys were adult actors, and Hansen became the face of a uniquely public form of televised shaming—and reckoning.

That’s the setting for Primetime, the debut narrative feature from director Lance Oppenheim. Robert Pattinson stars as Hansen in a performance already generating Oscar buzz, alongside Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Anna Faris, and Phoebe Bridgers in her first major screen role. The film’s central question, Oppenheim tells W, is an existential one: “How do you maintain a sense of self when you're doing this dark work twenty-four seven, 365?”

Written by first-time screenwriter Ajon Singh, who adapted it from a 2007 Esquire article by Luke Dittrich, Primetime charts Predator’s rise from network oddity to national sensation, and the personal costs of the ambition and self-righteousness that—at least in Oppenheim’s telling—fueled Hansen and his team. It ends roughly where the original Predator did, with the suicide of a Texas prosecutor following one of the show's stings. From start to finish, it’s a surrealist fever dream, which is exactly what Oppenheim wanted.

The 30-year-old director from South Florida has built his career blurring the line between fact and fiction, producing a steady body of films like Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, and Ren Faire since graduating from Harvard in 2019, where he studied documentary. But this fall, with Primetime and You Can See Everything—the top-secret Elizabeth Holmes documentary he co-directed with Nathan Fielder—both arriving in theaters, he’s about to be everywhere. The films debuted at Venice and Telluride, respectively, and it’s been a whirlwind month for Oppenheim, who caught up with W before Primetime’s September 25 theatrical release to discuss directing Pattinson and releasing two films at once:

You were born in 1996, and To Catch a Predator ran from 2004 to 2007. Did you grow up watching it?

As a kid, I was obsessed with it. I discovered it through South Park and all the parodies, because it was off the air by then. Chris Hansen almost seemed like this guy with superhuman abilities. He could make one of these predators he'd caught in his manufactured, constructed reality do anything and obey the laws of a world where he was the most powerful person.

He became larger than life.

There was so much swagger. The catchphrases and one-liners felt like Scarface. "Have a seat" was his version of "say hello to my little friend." I didn't know if I was watching a prank show like Punk'd, or a news show, or a circus with Chris Hansen as the ringleader. It was the first time I'd interacted with a bizarre media experiment that mixed truth and fiction.

You’ve said the project started with a $30 Chris Hansen Cameo your wife bought you in 2024.

In the video, he asks me to have a seat, congratulates me on Spermworld, and then starts talking about all the new investigations he’s doing. I thought, this is the guy I grew up with, this crusading journalist, but now he's a strange, self-aware, hyper-performative version of himself. I started watching his other Cameos. In one, he called somebody a certified "flex offender" instead of a certified sex offender. I was like, this is so weird—you can pay him thirty dollars, and he's going to pretend you're a child predator and then wish you happy birthday. What happened to the Chris Hansen I grew up with? Or was this always the Chris Hansen who existed?

Hansen has objected publicly to the film—he called it an "insult" and a "work of fiction" to The Hollywood Reporter, bought ad time before screenings to promote his own network, and said he’s weighing legal action. Why did you decide not to involve him from the beginning?

I felt like I had everything I needed with the Cameo. Not to sound glib about it—I mean that earnestly. I read his book, Protecting Your Children from Online Enemies Already in Your Home. I read his blog from that time. I talked to the hidden camera operator, Mitchell Wagenberg, who worked with him on To Catch a Predator and a lot of the hidden camera shows he tried to do after.

It almost felt like we were adapting the internet's version of Chris Hansen rather than the real Chris Hansen. You can self-mythologize all you want, but at a certain point it becomes part of culture. The Odyssey wasn't told by Odysseus. This movie shouldn't be told by Chris Hansen. It should be told by the fans of Chris Hansen, which is us.

Robert Pattinson came on as a producer before agreeing to star as Hansen. What was it like directing him?

Rob is the only actor in the history of cinema who'd make the choices he makes in this film. The second week of shooting, I said, I think you're doing Chris Hansen, but you're also doing Jerry Maguire and Dracula. He was always elusive and mysterious about it, and he would surprise me all the time. I found it very frightening to deal with. It reminded me of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Very heightened, but with a level of tragedy and insecurity, something very honest.

As I was editing, I realized maybe what drew him to actually agree to do the movie is that he relates to this character. He became famous overnight when Twilight came out. There was a narrative around him and a persona and expectations of how he should fit into it. That tension of being the person everyone thinks you should be is what the film is about. I doubt Rob will agree with me, but I see large parts of him in the movie.

You shot You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes documentary with Nathan Fielder, over the same period and with much of the same crew. How are they in conversation with each other?

There are superficial similarities—Elizabeth Holmes and Chris Hansen are both public figures known for personas, and don many masks. But it's so important to me that people see You Can See Everything with as little context as possible. So if you know anybody who's seen it and is spoiling it, please tell them to stop. I'm being serious.

Both films arrive within weeks of each other, after years of work.

It's amazing. None of it feels particularly real. I'm the luckiest person on the planet. I just have to make sure I don't fuck it up.