Primetime's director answered Chris Hansen, then talked up the Elizabeth Holmes documentary he shot in secret
The director of Primetime didn't push back on the review from the man his film is about. He said the reaction proves the film's point. Then he talked about the Elizabeth Holmes film he was shooting in secret at the same time.
Lance Oppenheim, who directed Primetime, has an answer for the man his film is about. Chris Hansen spent Friday calling the Robert Pattinson movie "bizarre" and "detached from reality" in a video quoted by The Detroit News. Asked about it by Variety, Oppenheim didn't argue with a word of it:
"His reaction to the film right now is exactly what the film is about."
His version of events: Hansen seemed excited about the project when they crossed paths at CrimeCon, then declined the standard NDA that came with an advance screening, and has since been telling talk shows he was never consulted. Oppenheim treats that whole arc as part of what the film is about rather than a problem for it.
Read more: 87% on Rotten Tomatoes and one unhappy viewer: Chris Hansen has finally seen Primetime
The other film he made at the same time
The more surprising part of the interview is the second title. Oppenheim is also behind You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes documentary he co-directed with Nathan Fielder for A24. It was shot in secret over four years and first surfaced as an unannounced screening at Telluride. Some details from Oppenheim and the coverage around it:
- The crew — about seven or eight people, who dropped other work for shoots across those four years.
- The overlap — the documentary and Primetime share a cinematographer, David Bolen, and a composer, Ari Balouzian, and were shot largely at the same time.
- The rating — the MPA has given the documentary an R for graphic nudity, as The Hollywood Reporter reported this week.
- The subject — Holmes, still serving her fraud sentence, has reportedly been approved to move to a halfway house next year.
His advice for watching it is simple:
"The best way to see it is to just let it wash over you."
Two true stories, one very busy 30-year-old
Oppenheim is 30 and came up through documentaries: Some Kind of Heaven, about a Florida retirement community, then Spermworld and HBO's Ren Faire. Primetime is his first scripted feature, and it opened the same week the Holmes film started drawing headlines of its own.
So the same director now has one real-life subject publicly disowning his movie, and another who spent four years in front of his camera for a film almost nobody outside the crew knew about. Hansen's full review goes out on his podcast.
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