‘Everybody Gets Slaphappy and Feels Insane’

On location for the night shoots, blizzards, and allergic reactions that went into making Primetime.

The process of filming Primetime, fittingly for a director who cut his teeth on documentaries, involved all the expected chaos of a narrative-film shoot with more than a little reality bleeding in around the edges. Based on real events, Lance Oppenheim’s movie stars an unhinged Robert Pattinson as the TV host Chris Hansen, who is chasing ever more salacious ways to increase ratings for his TV series To Catch a Predator. The show’s attempts to locate and entrap pedophiles lead the production team to stakeouts at rented houses and internet searches for even more perverse men, culminating in a nighttime sequence in which Hansen and his crew storm the mansion of one high-profile “whale.” “Night shoots are a black hole from which very few memories escape,” says Skylar Gisondo, who plays a decoy employed to pose as an underage boy. “Everybody gets slaphappy and feels insane.” Luckily, photographer Sinna Nasseri was on set to capture photos of the moments that, even for Primetime’s cast and crew, might feel a little blurry by now.

“This is when Chris and the rest of his team discover the identity of the predator they have spent most of the movie searching for — ‘the whale,’” says Oppenheim. “This was, weirdly, one of the harder things to shoot because of all the interplay between the rain towers outside, the lightning effects, and the real-time content we loaded onto the screens. There was a lot of complicated choreography going on in what needed to be a fairly intimate moment. It’s one of my favorite moments in the entire film: Chris’s desire to catch this guy is so strong that he pulls us into the computer until we’re spat out on the other side and meet the man in question.” 

“I’m posing for a photo before re-creating Del’s iconic line about whacking her toe on the banister,” says Phoebe Bridgers, who plays another Predator decoy. “I remember everyone laughing after I said it.”

“Phoebe’s time on the production was coming to an end,” says Merritt Wever, who plays producer Andie Bender. “I was bummed she was leaving and kept asking Lance if there was a way to write her into more of the movie because I just loved her presence. But as we began approaching the material in the final act and the night shoots wore on and we were about to decamp for the whale’s house, it started to feel like she was getting out right in the nick of time. The material in the final act was about to take a sinister turn and the container of production was about to shift and morph along with it. She and her character ducked out at exactly the right moment.“ 

“I really loved the feeling of this location — there was a big power plant with an incinerator on the other side,” says Oppenheim. “There was something that felt apt about this perpetual flame burning; you can barely make it out in the actual film, but I always loved that it was there. The location itself reminded me of an image straight out of Michael Mann’s Manhunter, which was a big visual reference for us.”

“This is a deleted scene from the movie, but I really love the image,” says Oppenheim. “We were trying to re-create Chris’s introduction from his Jersey Shore episode. We shot it in the Far Rockaways in the winter, right after a blizzard had landed, and it was so cold that we could only pull off a few takes before being outside became absolute agony. I’m hoping we can release this moment in the near future.” 

“I look stressed here,” says Oppenheim (left). “My son was born five days before production started, so on the weekends I’d go home to New York to see him and my wife. I think I had just returned to set here, and I was probably realizing I was in a world of pain that day with all of the stuff we needed to pull off. I’m not sure what time of day this was taken — probably when we arrived to set at the beginning of our night shoots, around 6 p.m. I’m so happy Sinna has a picture of the two of us together during the making of the movie. Watching him work and see the set through his own POV was really inspiring. He’d get right up in our performers’ faces, hide in cars, be mindful of our shots and be hovering right on the edge of the frame to make sure he’d get something great.”

“I remember working with Rob on Dan’s Chris Hansen impression,” says Gisondo. “We went through the scene a couple of times with Rob reading my lines so I could get a sense of what he would do.” Adds Bridgers: “The big night shoot. I was having insane allergies and there is concealer in my nose in this photo. I remember mostly pretending to be typing with Skyler and trying not to pass out.” 

“I loved the gag of the camera in the pool, and in case you were worried, we sacrificed an already-dead camera,” says Oppenheim. 

“This was right before the raid sequence toward the end of the film,” says Oppenheim. “I really wanted it to feel heightened, almost like a mix of the carnival that comes to town at the end of Ace in the Hole, the Battle of Helm’s Deep in The Lord of the Rings, and the invasion of Afghanistan, which is sort of in the background of every screen in the movie. The production rented this crazy vehicle, a Lenco BearCat with pressurized automatic suicide doors that made a wild sound every time they opened. I wanted to do something with Rob here that felt like a big arrival, almost like an action movie, where Chris Hansen emerges looking like the Terminator, a true warrior. I remember that after a take or two, Rob asked Dan Garber, my editor, if he looked like Mark Wahlberg in Shooter. I think he did!”