10 OctOber 8-14, 2026 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | TICKETS gablestage.org (305) 445-1119 September 25 - October 18 A Regional Premiere Starring Ella Olesen Directed by Nicole Stodard Box Office (305) 445-1119 Month XX–Month XX, 2008 miaminewtimes.com MIAMI NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | ART | STAGE | NIGHT+DAY | METRO | RIPTIDE | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Florida man Our state’s “crazy stories” fueled “Primetime” director Lance Oppenheim’s career. BY DOUGLAS MARKOWITZ L ance Oppenheim, a born-and-raised Broward native, is currently one of the busiest men in entertainment. On September 25, the celebrated documentarian released his fiction film debut: “Primetime,” starring Robert Pat- tinson as NBC television host Chris Hansen. Dramatizing the reporter’s stewardship of the controversial “Dateline” segment “To Catch A Predator,” in which Hansen and his crew lured alleged child predators to sting houses in order to extract a public confession before turning them over to police, the film grossed more than $19 million in its first weekend. If that isn’t enough, Oppenheim is also about to release a new, highly anticipated non- fiction film directed alongside an even more famous face: comedian and host of HBO series “The Rehearsal,” Nathan Fielder. Their docu- mentary, “You Can See Everything,” is a fea- ture-length profile of Elizabeth Holmes — the former CEO of health tech startup Theranos and convicted fraudster — filmed in the weeks before she began serving her prison sentence. “The experience of making it was so all- consuming,” Oppenheim says. “We shot a lot of it; we then had to take a break to just sort of wait and see what would happen, and in that period I made ‘Primetime.’ And then once life started kicking into gear again, and we had to go out and shoot stuff, I put ‘Primetime’ on pause in [post-production], and I went back and shot more of ‘You Can See Everything.’ Then we finished both movies concurrently.” To be sure, Oppenheim has come a long way from his Broward origins. Born in Holly- wood (...Florida) in 1996, the 30-year-old di- rector recalls a diffuse childhood with friends and family spread across Broward and Palm Beach counties. He lived in Weston and later Southwest Ranches, went to school in Fort Lauderdale at the private Pine Crest School, and many of his friends lived far away in Mi- ami and Boca Raton. The distance resulted in a rather introverted youth who keyed in on the peculiarities around him. “Most of my childhood was spent in my room watching movies and reading the local newspaper. And I was obsessed with movies so much. Reading the Sun Sentinel actually was the thing that started to get me really go- ing, because I would see so many crazy sto- ries about people who would come to Florida to kind of find ways to reinvent themselves, or they’d find some sort of hobby or occupa- tional dream that they would take to the fur- thest limits, and there’d be something really interesting and newsworthy about it.” Those stories certainly influenced his first full-length documentary and Harvard under- graduate thesis, “Some Kind of Heaven.” De- buting at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, the film takes a detailed look at life in The Villages, the world’s largest retirement community, lo- cated between Ocala and Orlando. Shot over 18 months within the community’s Disney World- like confines, the film follows several Villages residents whose day-to-day struggles contrast with the area’s “Boomer Paradise” image. Plenty of people find the Villages to be quite lonely; one woman is forced out of retirement after the death of her husband and yearns to go home to Boston, while another plotline fol- lows a man living out of his car hoping to find a rich, single partner to settle down with. Else- where, the film chronicles people overreacting to the freedom of retirement, such as one cou- ple of previously straight-laced Southerners dealing with the husband’s erratic new per- sonality and increased recreational drug use. The film ultimately captures the deep contrast between the realities of living in Florida and the fantasies that attract people to the state, something that Oppenheim considers a uniquely Floridian phenomenon. “I became very interested in this state of mind that I think is maybe distinctly Florid- ian, of people who sort of become entombed by their own ambitions or decide to live in an isolationist version of reality, or a dream state, which I think Florida uniquely provides in a lot of ways,” Oppenheim says. Becoming trapped by one’s own ambition is certainly a theme in “Primetime.” With his reptilian take on Chris Hansen, Robert Pat- tinson plays the TV host as a sort of split per- sonality. There’s the public-facing persona as a sort of righteous vaudeville vampire lurking behind curtains, waiting to pounce on the so- called predators. Then there’s the off-camera Hansen, whose lust for TV stardom and infe- riority complex over falling away from more legitimate reporting — the character invokes a self-mythologizing story about investigating child slavery in India to justify the predator stings — turns him into a sort of white knight who genuinely believes he’s “cleansing the world of an ancient evil.” Oppenheim’s heavily stylized direction skillfully externalizes the dark and sordid psy- chology of Hansen and the “Predator” phe- nomenon. Its garish color design, expressive lighting, and theatrical production design em- phasize the artifice of both the show and the suburban-built environment in which it takes place. Sadly, the director wasn’t able to realize his own ambition of shooting the film in his home state, a place where all those characteristics are freely available. While parts of “Pri- metime” are set in Fort Myers, where “Dateline” set up a sting house to lure predators, the crew wasn’t able to shoot in Florida due to the lack of tax incentives for production. They ended up shooting in New Orleans, where Oppenheim found it difficult to replicate the unique aspects of the state. “I wanted to shoot all of it in Florida,” he says. “I’m really hoping something changes there soon because making movies in Florida is, for myself and especially for my cinematog- rapher David Boland and I — there’s nothing greater than that. There’s the unpredictability, the chaos, the nuclear sunsets, the things that we’re constantly searching for in our work. It’s hard to find anywhere else.” A24’s “Primetime” is in theaters everywhere. [email protected] ▼ Culture Director Lance Oppenheim (center) behind the scenes on the set of “Primetime,” starring Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen. Photo by Sinna Nasseri “I BECAME VERY INTERESTED IN THIS STATE OF MIND THAT I THINK IS MAYBE DISTINCTLY FLORIDIAN.”