Anyone who watched “To Catch a Predator” in its mid-2000s heyday knows the drill. A grown man pulls up to a suburban house expecting to meet a minor. Hidden cameras are rolling. Then Chris Hansen walks into the room and delivers the line everyone is waiting for: “Why don’t you have a seat?”
“Primetime,” A24’s new film opening in theaters today, is more interested in what was happening on the other side of those cameras. Lance Oppenheim’s first scripted feature follows Hansen and the NBC team behind the sting operation as the show’s success creates pressure to make each bust bigger than the last. Catching predators may have been the mission, but this was also network television, and “Primetime” spends much of its time in that uncomfortable space between journalism and entertainment.
Robert Pattinson plays Hansen, but this isn’t a straight impersonation. His version is recognizable but heightened, drawing as much from the public persona and eventual meme as the broadcaster himself. It’s also the kind of performance Pattinson seems to relish these days. He goes for it, making big choices and trusting that the filmmakers will know how far to take them. For editor Daniel Garber, that meant figuring out just how much of that heightened Hansen belonged in the final film.
Garber calls Pattinson one of the most camera-aware actors he has worked with. He also describes him as “actory,” and very much means it as a compliment. “He’s always making huge decisions when he’s acting,” Garber says. “He really delights in going to extremes and trying things that are unexpected.” For an editor, those choices gave Garber what he calls an “embarrassment of riches.”
Garber had previously cut Oppenheim’s documentaries, and that shared history carried over to the director’s first narrative feature. Oppenheim kept experimenting on set, sometimes pulling lines from earlier drafts or asking the actors to try something completely different. That same process continued in post. Garber and Oppenheim weren’t simply assembling what had been shot. They were still figuring out what “Primetime” could be.
That included finding new uses for footage that wasn’t originally intended to make the final cut. Security-camera and DV footage shot for monitors within scenes became part of the film itself, allowing Garber to move between its more cinematic perspective and the cold, unpolished images captured by the sting cameras. The distinction becomes increasingly important as “Primetime” digs deeper into Hansen and the people around him. The film isn’t particularly interested in debating whether the men being caught deserve to be exposed. It’s more curious about what happens to the people doing the exposing when those confrontations become television, week after week.
Awards Focus spoke with Garber about finding “Primetime” in the editing room, bringing the instincts of documentary filmmaking into a narrative feature, shaping Pattinson’s unconventional take on Hansen and how much the film ultimately wanted to say about the man at its center.
Awards Focus: You and Lance have worked together in documentary, and “Primetime” feels like an interesting bridge into narrative because you’re still dealing with real people, real events and imagery that already exists in the public consciousness. From an editor’s perspective, what changed for you in making that transition?
Daniel Garber: There are a number of differences between documentary and narrative film. But what I found very refreshing about this in particular is that Lance took to narrative filmmaking so quickly, in part because he brought his narrative filmmaking style really in line with how he makes a lot of his documentaries.
The way he operates, both with actors and with real humans he’s filming, is he’s always kind of prodding and picking at the reality, trying to get to something that’s a little bit deeper, that’s not necessarily readily observable. He’s not exactly a strict cinéma vérité documentary filmmaker to begin with. His documentaries are very stylized.
When he was on set for “Primetime,” he was always really keen to riff. He would always shoot what was in the script and really honor the intentions of the script, but he would always pivot and then try to get alternate lines and throw things from older drafts of the script at the actors just to see how they react.
That sort of riffing is where a lot of his work comes alive most. Similarly, he treated the edit in this film as a real opportunity to finesse the vision and unlock new possibilities. He always really relies on editing as a place to refine the vision.
AF: When the film ended, my immediate reaction was how quickly it seemed to move. It’s roughly 110 minutes with credits, but it doesn’t feel that long. Was there ever a substantially longer cut, or scenes and storylines you wish you could have kept?
Garber: Eventually, most films kind of tell you what length they want to be. Sometimes I feel like I or the director will have some intuition about how long we might ultimately want it to be. Lance and I are really fans of conciseness. We try to push for things to be as short as they can be and as potent as they can be.
I think there’s often this inverse relationship between the runtime and the entertainment value or the intensity of the experience for the audience. We’re more interested in having people along for the ride the whole way, even if that’s a slightly shorter ride. We were always aiming for something on the order of 90 to 95 minutes before credits.
I don’t think there were a lot of things we cut out that I would have wanted to bring back in. A lot of it was much more condensing, just reducing air and getting out of scenes a little bit sooner than we had originally intended to. In certain instances, we combined scenes into these larger montages.
For instance, there’s that scene where Jeff Zucker tells Chris Hansen and Andie that they’re being moved to a primetime slot. That was originally a few different scenes. There’s this crew dinner that takes place in a Chinese restaurant, and then there’s also the scene where Zucker is actually giving them this news. We realized that the energy was just a little bit too low when we were doing it as shot and as it was originally intended.
Even though the material was very good, we realized that we could more effectively capture this emotional experience of being given this primetime slot by combining the two scenes into this much more energetic and kaleidoscopic moment. That’s the sort of thing that ultimately brought down the runtime much more, those kinds of combinations that would make things play a lot faster.
AF: The predator stings have a natural tension built into them. How do you maintain that rhythm and tension during the quieter stretches dealing with the production itself or the characters’ backstories?
Garber: There are a couple of reasons that I think the film manages to stay engaging even between the higher-drama moments with the actual predator stings.
One is that, especially at the beginning of the film, there is this kind of documentary interest in the way the entire production operates. You have this gradual revelation of the entire apparatus of the show and the kind of labor and machinery that goes into producing it. I think that sort of world-building is really fascinating and really related to the media critique aspect of the film.
The second thing is that a lot of the drama for our characters is really what carries you through to the end of the film, and a lot of that is happening in the moments between the actual stings. Even though the premise of a sting is in many ways the highest-octane dramatic moment, the ways that Dan, Andie and Chris are processing the things happening to them individually often happen in these quieter moments outside of the stings.
AF: Chris Hansen is presented as a pretty complicated figure in the film. How much did you and Lance want to shape a particular point of view about him in the edit, versus presenting the contradictions of who he is and allowing the audience to decide how they feel about him?
Garber: Chris Hansen is a really complicated character. Whatever critiques the film has of the show and of his work, that’s still couched within the fact that he’s pursuing a mission that I think is fundamentally really sympathetic.
The question is not, “Is Chris Hansen a monster?” The question is, what does it do to someone to engage in the pursuit that he has, to live inside of this darkness for as much time as he does?
It’s much more about the entire apparatus of the show, which is, of course, partly his doing, but it’s more about how that acts upon the people who work within it. How is Dan, how is Andie and how is Chris affected by the process of making this show and then achieving this level of visibility through the move to primetime?
AF: There are some striking visual sequences throughout the film, including the use of mirrors, blurred lenses and other imagery that seems to reflect Chris’s psychology. How much of that subjective quality is discovered in the edit versus something established in the script or during production?
Garber: It’s all there in the script, in the sense that we’re always being guided by the intentions that Ajon (Singh) set forth in the script. One of the reasons Lance and I were so excited to work on this project originally is that it had that kind of subjective, fever-dream quality on the script level.
That worked so well for the way Lance operates, where even in his documentaries he’s often finding ways to make these objective moments feel like they’re much more emotionally subjective to the subjects of the film, in ways that are definitely not totally naturalistic as you would expect in a documentary.
A lot of that is expressed through David Bolen’s camera work. I think he’s a phenomenal DP. One of the reasons Lance and David work so well together is that they really do have this very stylized and very subjective way of approaching the camera work.
The trick in the edit is not so much making it feel more that way, but finding ways to navigate among different character subjectivities. When you have the multiple threads of the story, Chris’s perspective, Dan’s perspective and Andie’s perspective, how do you manage to weave in and out of those different perspectives instead of just being trapped in one person’s, say Chris Hansen’s, own experience of all this?
AF: The recreated security-camera footage is often presented in split screens or quad views. When you started going through all of that material, did it unlock anything about the film that you hadn’t anticipated?
Garber: Yeah, that’s a great observation because, in fact, a lot of the DV, security-cam-type footage was not originally intended to be used in the film itself.
That was all filmed on set to be played back on set. On the first day of shooting a sting, they would shoot the DV footage. Day two, they would play it back on the monitors in the control room. The idea was that it was always going to be part of the visual language of the film, but we weren’t going to cut full screen into each of those feeds or into the quad view.
It was very early on in the edit when I immediately understood that was actually a tool available to us. I started temping some of those things out and sending these rough cuts of scenes to Lance, and he immediately took to it and started filming much more with the intention of actually cutting directly to that footage.
What’s so refreshing about that for me is, first of all, thematically it fits very well with the film because we’re trying to make this media collage that references the look and feel of TV at the time. That was one really quick way to do that.
The second is that it creates this tension between the more subjective experience that’s captured on the cinema camera and this very cold and objective look of the surveillance camera. That dynamic toggling between the two kept things very dynamic in the edit.
AF: Without getting too deeply into spoilers, the final major sequence has an enormous amount to resolve for Chris, Andie and Dan, while also dealing with an event audiences may already know from real-life accounts. How difficult was it to find the right balance between the history and the characters’ experience of it?
Garber: There’s so much pressure on this entire sequence because it’s supposed to wrap up all the main storylines. Originally, that was the end of the film. There is now this kind of coda with Dan at the very end of the film, and that was something we conceived and shot a little bit later.
For a while, there was all of this pressure on that one sequence to reach the end of each character storyline, tie up Andie’s conversations with ABC and whether or not she’s going to leave Chris, resolve Dan’s feelings toward the entire enterprise, and then answer the question of what happens with Chris’s pursuit of this whale of a predator.
There is a lot of information that’s known about this out there, but what this film can offer, in contrast to other more journalistic accounts of it, is the experience grounded in the perspectives of each of these characters we’ve been living with for this entire time.
It’s not even so much about that incident as it is about all the things that have to happen before you get there to feel like this story concludes in a satisfying place for each of them. A lot of what we were doing was emotional finessing along those lines.
The aftermath of the incident was the boldest decision that Lance made in many ways because it’s so durational. You’re just sitting primarily in the broadcast cameras afterward. We really wanted to leave the audience with this kind of pit in their stomach and this sinking feeling of reality coming crashing in, all of the mania leading up to this event falling away and just being left with the cold reality that something tragic has happened.
AF: You mentioned the ending with Dan was conceived later. Why ultimately end with him rather than returning to Chris or the future of the show?
Garber: At a certain point, the film feels to me like a two-hander in that Chris’s conclusion ultimately is that he’s basically stuck in this loop. He is kind of forced to continue pursuing this ancient evil that he’s been obsessed with for the entire film. The film wants to project forward into the future beyond the end of the film and imagine that the future of Chris Hansen is continuing to do what he does on the show.
In many ways, that doesn’t feel like a definitive ending. We get so close to Dan over the course of the film, in part because he’s the person who enters as this kind of naïf, who’s sort of the audience stand-in in many ways, and then has to go through all the trauma of working on the show.
Although there is this moment where Dan walks off set in the middle of the climax of the film, we didn’t quite think that was enough of a check-in with him as a character. We wanted to have an actual separate moment with him to get a sense of how far he has come from being this wide-eyed, bushy-tailed actor we meet at the beginning of the movie. How can we resolve that arc of his professional ambitions and how he sees himself independent of the show?
That was why we wanted to go back to him at the end, since he’s so much of the heart of the movie.
AF: For people who may not have watched “To Catch a Predator” when it originally aired, are characters like Dan and Andie based on specific real people or are they composites?
Garber: They are sort of composites. Those aren’t their real names, but they’re inspired by figures who were on the show. Ajon did a great deal of research into the actual producers and decoys who were on the show, so it’s all rooted in real events and real people.
AF: Skyler Gisondo’s Dan has quite an arc. He begins as this naïve aspiring actor and becomes increasingly disillusioned, eventually questioning what participating in all of this says about him. As an editor, how do you track that progression when it happens over a relatively short period of time?
Garber: What’s so amazing to me about Skyler’s performance is just how remarkably solid it was, no matter what else changed in the cut from the very beginning of the edit to the very end of it. It was a very drawn-out process, and Skyler’s performance was always rock solid.
It always seemed like the test audiences we showed it to really gravitated toward him as a character. It’s partly because he’s so expressive. You can read so much into his face, and cutting to a close-up of him was almost like this get-out-of-jail-free card where you could kind of know where you were meant to be within the emotional experience of the movie just by seeing how Dan was reacting to things.
A big part of what we did end up finessing about his performance was the storyline with his friend Troy. Part of the arc there is seeing the way that his relationship to the people he cares about ends up getting distorted by the experience of being on the show.
Troy is also, in many ways, this kind of stand-in for Dan’s ambitions as an actor, somebody who’s there with him in the trenches at the very beginning, telling him what his lane is and how to go about being an actor. Ultimately, the show drives this wedge between the two of them, and at one point Dan lashes out at him angrily.
That relationship, and Eric Rahill’s amazing, very comedic performance, was at the core of tracing Dan’s arc over the course of the film. He’s the greatest comic relief that the movie can offer in an otherwise pretty dark story.
AF: Robert Pattinson gives another very distinctive performance here. Because he’s playing someone audiences may already recognize, there’s potentially a fine line between watching Robert Pattinson perform an interpretation of Chris Hansen and simply accepting him as Chris within this film. What can you do in the edit to help the audience cross that line?
Garber: Rob is one of the most camera-aware actors I’ve ever seen. It is kind of amazing. I guess this comes from being a child actor himself and just having been in front of cameras for so much of his life, but he has this sixth sense for where the light is and where the camera is and where exactly to stand so that it catches the light and catches his face in just the right way. He is incredibly skilled on just a technical level.
There is something that I think is very actory about the way that he approaches things, and the edit is a real opportunity to help hone that. He’s always making huge decisions when he’s acting. He really delights in going to extremes and trying things that are unexpected.
That just leaves the editor with such an embarrassment of riches. There are so many different ways that you could take the character. There were a lot of different tools that we had to apply in order to determine what the right version of Chris Hansen would be.
One larger thematic guidepost that we were always thinking about was not who Chris Hansen, the man in real life, is, but rather the Chris Hansen who’s already been kind of refracted through the media. Rob’s main reference points were actually media surrounding Chris, and Lance was somebody who encountered Chris Hansen first through parodies of “To Catch a Predator” rather than the show itself.
The Chris Hansen that you see onscreen is not really Chris Hansen exactly, but Chris Hansen the meme, almost. Somebody who has become a media persona already. Then you have this very skilled actor who’s taking that persona and trying to slip it on like a kind of suit.
A lot of what I was doing in the edit was assessing whether Rob’s performance felt like it existed within that world of the meme of Chris Hansen.
AF: Editing can be one of the more difficult crafts for audiences to identify because, when it works, it can become almost invisible. When you look at your peers’ work, particularly the kind of work that receives awards attention, what tells you that you’re seeing great editing?
Garber: I find it really difficult to determine what good editing is sometimes because good editing is so often inextricably tied to all of the other crafts.
When editing goes well, it’s ultimately one of the core tools of directing, and it helps elevate everybody else’s work. Whenever I look at a performance that is really effective, I think, well, not only is that a really skilled actor, but they must have had a great editor to make that performance work as well as it did, because for sure, in the hands of a worse editor, every performance suffers.
A big part of it for me is feeling like the editing conveys a kind of unity of vision and manages to tie the elements effectively together, which is a very hard thing to actually identify. A lot of people think about pacing and rhythm, and that is very much true, and those are the unique tools of the edit. But I think a lot of it is really about effectively elevating every other person’s craft.
AF: Finally, this is dark material, and as the editor you’re spending considerably more time immersed in it than an audience ever will. How did you separate yourself from that material when you left the editing room?
Garber: That is something that a lot of editors have to deal with, especially documentary editors who are dealing with really difficult subject matter. I know there are a lot of people who, if they’re working on true crime series or documentaries about war, develop pretty serious mental health burdens from all of that.
On this film, there were a couple of things that helped. One was just, for me individually, having pursuits outside of film. Exercising regularly was very helpful, and doing ceramics as a way of engaging in a non-topical way with my creative faculties.
But I think the bigger thing really is just who you surround yourself with. Having on this film a team that I really stand by, like my assistant editor, Katyann Gonzalez; Lance, who was a constant presence in the office; along with his wife Abbey, who’s an EP on the film; and the rest of our post departments. These are just such great people to spend time with, such loving and supportive people, that despite the subject matter, it was always a real pleasure to be in the office with them every day.