You see how this looks, right? Now we do.
Lance Oppenheim‘s Primetime hit the big screen inside Sala Grande Saturday for a much anticipated world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The A24 pic casts Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen — who repeatedly uttered that phrase to alleged pedophiles after they were confronted by camera crews — and the audience caught what they put down and responded with a nearly eight-minute electric standing ovation.
It was a packed house inside the theater with the entire cast joining Oppenheim and Pattinson as well as some notable Hollywood auteurs and stars. A few rows back behind the film’s creative team were Ari Aster, Chloe Zhao, Mona Fastvold and Amanda Seyfried (who snuck in after the lights went down before the premiere) and others. At one point, Aster was among a group of attendees that began chanting “Lance! Lance! Lance! Lance!” in honor of Oppenheim.
Shortly before that, Pattinson turned to around to greet his partner, Suki Waterhouse, with a kiss after she had been cheering enthusiastically for the film. Spotted capturing the scene on his iPhone was Jeff Zucker, the former NBC chief who plays himself in the film and hit the Lido in support of Primetime as he oversaw the run of To Catch a Predator as a Dateline franchise.
Oppenheim’s film was among the most sought after tickets of the first weekend at this year’s festival. In his official director’s statement for Venice, the filmmaker, whose previous works include the series Ren Faire and films Spermworld and Some Kind of Heaven, said he set out to make “an institutional portrait of To Catch a Predator at the height of its success.”
He added: “I wanted to trace the disparate ambitions of people who existed inside this apparatus — a journalistic crusader, a mercenary TV producer and a wide-eyed Hollywood dreamer — converging into a moment of crisis. And I liked the idea of revisiting the media culture of the early 2000s, before the news landscape fractured, when a “primetime” slot felt like a matter of life or death. For some, it was.
In doing so, he drafted a cast to star opposite Pattinson that included Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers and Bokeem Woodbine. Fun fact: Oppenheim also directed Bridgers’ recently released music video “Lost Boys,” the lead single off her new album Lost Weekend. During the film’s standing ovation, after the aforementioned group shouted “Lance!” they turned their attention to Bridgers with “Phoebe! Phoebe! Phoebe!”
The Hollywood Reporter’s David Canfield broke the first interview with the film’s creative team. Primetime is loosely adapted by first-time screenwriter Ajon Singh from an Esquire article by Luke Dittrich, and it dramatizes the darkest year in Hansen’s tenure on To Catch a Predator.
“I always loved the way To Catch a Predator mixed truth and fiction — creating this apparatus, blending artifice actors with fake decoy houses and props like the sweet tea and the pepperoni pizza, that would then collide with very, very real stakes,” Oppenheim told Canfield. “How do you create something that captures the darkest feelings of humanity mixed with the feeling you would get when you’d hear Chris Hansen say one of his all-time great one-liners?”
Primetime marks Pattinson’s first producing credit, and in an interview with THR, he said it marked the first time he boarded a project pre-director through release. And he dove deep into the research to create his version of the investigative journalist/entertainment news host.
“I watched a ton of the show, every episode of his podcast, every interview I could find,” Pattinson explained. “But I knew from the first read of the script that the character in the movie was going to be a conceptual figure based on the public persona of ‘Chris Hansen’ as he’s been portrayed and perceived across all mediums and internet culture — a reconfigured egregore of sorts.”
Hansen was not involved in making the movie, and he said he declined an invitation to see it because he was asked to sign an NDA. As reported by THR’s Seth Abramovitch, Hansen purchased pre-show advertising on every screen showing the A24 release, as a way to promote TruBlu, his streaming network devoted to the same kind of predator investigations.
During Saturday afternoon’s press conference, Pattinson said that despite Hansen’s objections, “Obviously, I hope he likes the movie.”
The 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival concludes with an awards ceremony on Sept. 12.
