Why ‘Primetime’ Doesn’t Look Like Any Movie You’ve Seen Before

This post was originally published on here

Before “Primetime” director Lance Oppenheim had seen formative films like Abbas Kiarostami’s “Close-Up” or Orson Welles’ “F for Fake,” in which masters of cinema blurred the line between fiction and reality, he had watched “To Catch a Predator.”

“I remember thinking, ‘What am I watching?  Is this a documentary? Is this a scripted movie? Is it something new, something different?'” said Oppenheim of watching the news program that lured child predators into homes rigged with hidden cameras as TV journalist Chris Hansen waited in the wings to confront the unsuspecting molesters. “I couldn’t tell if it was like a prank show or a horror movie or a news program.”

For a documentary filmmaker, who shot nonfiction subjects (“Ren Faire,” “Spermworld,” “Some Kind of Heaven,” and the soon-to-be-released Nathan Fielder joint “You Can See Everything”) as if they were scripted narrative films, “Primetime,” starring Robert Pattinson as Hansen during the rise and fall of “To Catch a Predator,” became the perfect project. It gave the young auteur a chance to blur the line between fiction and reality from the scripted side of the equation.

Oppenheim could plug into how the news program created, in his words, “this manufactured reality,” where adult actors pretended to be children, houses that looked like sets (some reminding Oppenheim of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”), and “props that looked like cookies, pepperoni pizzas, and sweet tea, that took on this feeling of dread.” It was a manufactured reality that would then collide with the “hyperreal situation” of a potential predator walking in to attempt something terrible.

“Hansen had created this space and world where time seemed to freeze, and the laws of gravity and physics and reality would be a little different; it was almost like the zone in [Andrei] Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker,'” said Oppenheim. “I liked the challenge of attempting to express that through visual, cinematic terms.”

The result is a film that looks radically different from anything else we’ve seen on the big screen in recent years, which was the filmmaker’s stated intention. Here are four ways Oppenheim and his longtime cinematographer David Bolen achieved that distinctive look.

Multiple Formats

Oppenheim wanted to instill in his audience that same “What am I watching?” sense that he had experienced with the original series. To pull it off, Bolen used 12 different camera formats, including mini-DV (many mirroring Hansen’s hidden cameras), vintage tube and broadcast cameras, a micro-endoscope used for colonoscopies, along with a more standard modern-day movie camera (Arri Alexa 35).

The goal, according to Oppenheim, was to create an “elastic aesthetic value system,” where they might run a shot with an Arri Alexa 35, then do another take with a radically different camera, something Oppenheim admits befuddled some of his crew.

“I think a lot of people thought I was like Tommy Wiseau on the set of ‘The Room,’ not knowing what I was doing and just kind of arbitrarily making choices,” said Oppenheim. “ I love Tommy Wiseau, and I love the way he made ‘The Room,’ so I was like, ‘I don’t care. I’m going to run the scene once on an Alexa, and do it again on a broken Plumecon tube camera.'”

Plumecon: A Collapsing Image

Oppenheim consulted with veteran TV cameraman Mitchell Wagenberg, who worked on the original “To Catch a Predator,” “Cash Cab,” and traditional news programs with TV journalists like “60 Minutes” Mike Wallace. Oppenheim wasn’t only trying to learn how shows used to be shot; he was also looking for new emotional and narrative brushstrokes.

While much has been made of the novelty of the medical colonoscopy camera, it was Wagenberg introducing the “Primetime” team to the Plumbicon that became the game-changer. It was an early attempt at a digital camera, used briefly by Wagenberg and others on news programs in the late ’80s before being discontinued.

“It was this antiquated technology where the tubes inside the camera would be physically warmed up, like microwaved, until it would produce an image,” explained Oppenheim.

Oppenheim was intrigued, desperate to better understand the long-gone technology, and set out to find and acquire one he could possibly use in the film.

“The Plumecon we found, the tubes had been burnt to a crisp, so every time we turned the camera on it would distort the images. It almost looked like a nuclear explosion had been set off right in front of us, and I loved that about it.  It reminded me of the [Werner] Herzog quote, ‘The moment you turn the camera on, you’re seeing a fiction,’ [and] the camera felt like it was honoring the spirit of that.”

Oppenheim admits that while shooting with the Plumecon, he had no idea how or if the image would hold up, but he also liked the idea that the image could “collapse a little.”

Describing his Plumecon brushstroke, Oppenheim said: “The colors all kind of bleed and run, and they’re kind of funny looking, and it feels a little dreamlike.”

Printing to 16mm

All the footage, regardless of which camera format it was shot on, was printed to 16mm film stock and then digitized for the edit. The reasons for this, and what it accomplished, are threefold.

“With the cinema camera [footage shot on the] Alexa, Dave and I were always sort of allergic to how digital it looked, and how crisp it felt,” said Oppenheim. “[The 16mm scan] was an effort to make the Alexa images feel tactile.”

Oppenheim also liked the layer of removal the scan supplied between the audience and the original image. He was inspired by a leaked version of director Lynne Ramsay and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey’s 2025 film “Die My Love,” starring Pattinson.

“A cam scanner version had come out from ‘Die My Love,’ and that movie was shot with Ektachrome, and I remember just thinking, ‘Wow, this is so fucking crazy, just the way it looks,'” said Oppenheim. “Obviously, when the movie came out it was even more beautiful, but there was something about that contact high, kind of like being a little bit removed from it that was interesting.”

Oppenheim also wanted to honor and expressively capture how “To Catch a Predator” today only exists online, and how the scan allowed him to create an expressive language of the internet.

“[‘To Catch a Predator’] doesn’t exist on DVDs, Blu-ray, all that we really have of it are these 360p and 480p versions that have seemingly been digitized by somebody else. So we’re watching something that’s been essentially reprinted twice. The audience is interacting with an object that had been scanned, that had been corrupted in some way. I liked conceptually that it rhymed with what we were doing with this sort of operatic, heightened portrait of Chris Hansen, the internet’s version of Chris Hansen.”

Color and the Colorist

While “Primetime” lays bare the dangers of what 2000s reality and new programs unleashed, Oppenheim said he still enjoys watching reality TV, but like many, the 30-year-old director is nostalgic for the TV of his youth.

“The thing that’s sort of depressing about the news when I look at it [today], aesthetically, everything is so grayscale, and there’s no color anymore. When you looked at things in the 2000s, especially in 2006, you’d turn on any program, like, ‘What Would You Do? With John Quiñones,’ and the colors were so saturated, almost pastel-like.”

While Oppenheim’s cinematic references for “Primetime” are works of Billy Wilder, Oliver Stone, Tarkovsky, and numerous films from the canon of film history, Oppenheim explained he wanted to capture the color saturation and feel of the TV he consumed during the time of “The Catch a Predator.”

“I grew up with these television shows and network shows like ‘The O.C.’ and ‘Smallville,’ and I [wanted] that stuff to enter the movie in some sort of way aesthetically.”

One of the reasons Bolen and Oppenheim felt comfortable with their bold experiments in creating the collapsing images of “Primetime” was that their longtime colorist, Damien Vandercruyssen, was at the controls. Vandercruyssen not only orchestrated how the brittle tube camera’s image, 16mm scans, and Bolen’s inventive cinematography would come together, he simultaneously pulled out the bold color and tactile quality Oppenheim associated with the images of that era.

“He’s an artist, and we couldn’t have done it without him,” said Oppenheim of Vandercruyssen. “[Damian] did so much insane work; he is the essential piece in the collaboration with David. What he did with this in the scanning process and creating this really tactile image – he’s a master.”

Sign up for Indiewire’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.