Lance Oppenheim is having what pretty much nobody could deny is a weird 2026; it’s not every day, after all, that the director of odd, highly personal projects like Some Kind Of Heaven or Ren Faire would suddenly have not just one, but two projects (scripted drama Primetime and documentary sensation You Can See Everything) suddenly occupying big chunks of the zeitgeist. And while Oppenheim has not been the dominant force on the press tour for either movie—by both his own inclinations, and the fact that his major collaborators on the two projects, Robert Pattinson and Nathan Fielder, take up a lot of the air in the room—he has been raising certain questions about his work. Like, if he didn’t love To Catch A Predator star and Primetime subject Chris Hansen so much, why would he have hired Batman to play him?
This is per a new GQ interview with Oppenheim, who states at several points during the interview that he prefers to let his films speak for him. (On the topic of his relationship with You Can See Everything‘s Elizabeth Holmes: “I feel like it’s in the movie. It’s like, even though I’m not on camera, I really try to create experiences that reflect my own emotions and my own point of view on a subject.”) Still, he does have thoughts on Hansen’s reaction to his other big A24 movie, calling it “exactly like the thesis of Primetime in real time.”
And then suddenly it enters this kind of spiritual battle between good and evil and “what’s Hollywood’s intention?” and all this stuff. It turns into more of a moral register. [Hansen has] flipped it into something about good versus evil and how the movie makes him into a villain, which I definitely don’t think it does. That wasn’t my intention. I love Chris Hansen and I love his show. And I got Batman to play him. I tried to make the closest thing to a superhero movie starring the guy who’s literally in Batman right now. So I’m a little bit confused, but it’s interesting. There’s this weird “life imitates art, art imitates life” thing going on. I kind of feel like I’m in a simulation or something.
Hansen has noted on multiple occasions that Oppenheim told him the movie was a “love letter,” which the TV host has been less than enthused about. Later in the GQ interview, Oppenheim dips deeper into what, exactly, he loves about Hansen so much, saying, “I felt like the only way to make something that felt spiritually true to me about Chris Hansen was, again, to essentially adapt the idea of him that came from the Cameos of him, a person who is both a crusader and an entertainer, a person who is a man, but also a meme, and he has embraced the meme—a person that has become a persona, effectively.”
Oh, and also, he talks about Billy Evans encouraging him to film him nude in the shower for You Can See Everything, in case you were curious; for the record, no, he doesn’t know why Evans wanted that to happen, either.
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