‘Stranger than stranger-than-fiction’: how Lance Oppenheim made the year’s two buzziest films

Primetime and You Can See Everything are both clammy, audacious awards contenders that challenge our sense of reality. Ahead of the release of his drama starring Robert Pattinson as a TV vigilante, the 30-year-old director talks crime, punishment and South Park To direct one movi

Primetime and You Can See Everything are both clammy, audacious awards contenders that challenge our sense of reality. Ahead of the release of his drama starring Robert Pattinson as a TV vigilante, the 30-year-old director talks crime, punishment and South Park 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 imp 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. Continue reading...