Lance Oppenheim, 30, Delivers Awards Season's Two Buzziest Films

By Elena Vasquez

Lance Oppenheim is 30 years old and has two of awards season's most talked-about films arriving back to back. Next month brings the release of You Can See Everything, the three-hour documentary he co-directed with Nathan Fielder. His drama Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson, follows close behind.

To direct one movie on everyone's lips in awards season is remarkable, as one observer put it. To make two begins to look like sorcery.

Both films are described as clammy, audacious awards contenders that challenge the audience's sense of reality — a description Oppenheim himself leaned into when discussing his work. Ahead of the release of his Pattinson drama, the director spoke about crime, punishment and South Park.

What is 'You Can See Everything'?

The documentary, co-directed with faux-naif deadpan prankster Nathan Fielder, spends a month living with disgraced health-tech mogul Elizabeth Holmes. The timing was fixed by circumstance: the filmmakers captured Holmes before she began her 11-year prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy.

Secrecy around the project runs deep. Variety magazine's list of Oscar predictions identifies one of the film's cast members only as "[Redacted]". Oppenheim described the finished film as "head-spinning".

The stakes are historical. The film is expected to become the first documentary nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards — a barrier no documentary has crossed in the Oscars' nearly century-long history.

In plain terms: one film, one month of access, and a potential first in the awards record books.

Who does Robert Pattinson play in 'Primetime'?

Pattinson delivers what is described as a high-wire performance as Chris Hansen, the sensationalist US television vigilante renowned for ambushing paedophiles on camera.

Hansen's To Catch a Predator ran as a segment of the current affairs show Dateline NBC between 2004 and 2007 — three years that made it both disreputable and highly addictive viewing.

Hansen later parlayed the idea, and his crusading shtick, into a succession of spin-offs. Some, including Hansen Vs Predators, had the same sleazy catnip quality. Others, such as a sting to collar bicycle thieves, did not.

Pattinson is the one attracting Oscar buzz for the role — a claim anchored to the performance itself rather than to studio publicity, according to the Guardian interview conducted with Oppenheim in a London hotel.

The takeaway: a Batman star playing a real-life TV vigilante, in a performance already circulating in awards conversations.

Who is Lance Oppenheim?

Oppenheim was born in Florida and is now 30. He has moved, in a single year, from rising documentarian to the director of two films that will define the coming awards conversation.

The pairing is unusual. One film is a drama with a major movie star playing a tabloid-television figure. The other is a documentary made under conditions of extreme secrecy with one of comedy's most unpredictable collaborators, Nathan Fielder.

Both projects share a fixation on reality and its distortions — the tag "stranger than stranger-than-fiction" captures the double remove at which both films operate. Oppenheim's stated interests in the interview: crime, punishment and South Park.

What happens next?

You Can See Everything arrives next month. Primetime follows with Pattinson's performance at the center of early Oscar predictions.

If the best-picture nomination materializes, Oppenheim and Fielder will have rewritten a rule of the Academy Awards that has held since its founding. Until then, the industry will be watching a 30-year-old director carrying two contenders where most filmmakers spend a career chasing one.