‘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 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…
Key points
- Lance Oppenheim, 30, directed two awards-season films: Primetime and You Can See Everything.
- Primetime stars Robert Pattinson as TV vigilante Chris Hansen and opens in UK cinemas on 30 October.
- You Can See Everything, co-directed with Nathan Fielder, follows Elizabeth Holmes before her prison sentence and opens on 20 November.
Lance Oppenheim, a 30-year-old filmmaker from Florida, has directed two of the year's most talked-about awards contenders. His narrative feature Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson as TV vigilante Chris Hansen, opens in UK cinemas on 30 October. His documentary You Can See Everything, co-directed with Nathan Fielder, opens on 20 November.
You Can See Everything is a three-hour film in which Oppenheim and Fielder spend a month living with disgraced health-tech mogul Elizabeth Holmes before she begins her 11-year prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy. Oppenheim calls the film 'head-spinning', and it is so secretive that Variety's Oscar predictions list one cast member only as '[Redacted]'.
What Primetime is about
Primetime is Oppenheim's first non-documentary feature. Pattinson plays Chris Hansen, the sensationalist US television vigilante known for ambushing paedophiles on To Catch a Predator, a segment of Dateline NBC between 2004 and 2007. Hansen later turned the idea into spin-offs.
Oppenheim said the show is 'so tonally strange' and feels like 'an alien object beamed in from Mars'. He described it as oscillating between making him nauseated and making him laugh. His challenge was to create something 'even stranger than stranger-than-fiction'.
Rob’s quite possibly the actor of our time
— Lance Oppenheim
Hansen's reaction and casting
Hansen has complained he was not consulted about the film. He accused Primetime of 'weaponised empathy', of making audiences feel sorry for the predators, and of portraying him and his staff as ratings-obsessed. He has also booked trailers for his own streaming platform, TruBlu, to run before US screenings.
Pattinson, a longtime Hansen fan, brought the project to Oppenheim intending only to produce. Oppenheim said Pattinson is 'quite possibly the actor of our time' and stitched vulnerable parts of himself into the role. Primetime follows Pattinson's other 2025 films The Drama and The Odyssey, with Dune: Part Three due in December.
