Lance Oppenheim, the documentarian who films real life like fiction

Lance Oppenheim

Photo: Colleen Sturtevant / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 26, 1996 Hollywood, Florida, United States
Occupation	Film director and documentary filmmaker
Known for	Primetime

Lance Oppenheim has a word for what he does, and it is not documentary. He calls it docuphantasia: real people, filmed where they actually live, framed with the symmetry and colour of a studio picture until the viewer starts to doubt that any of it happened. Within three weeks that doubt became his whole public argument, because two of his films reached American cinemas almost back to back, one a fiction about a television host who manufactured reality, the other a piece of reality about a founder who manufactured a company.

The sensibility was formed in the flat, sunlit suburbs of South Florida. Oppenheim was born in Hollywood, a beach city in Broward County, and grew up inland in Weston and then Southwest Ranches, the son of two real-estate attorneys who defended homeowners facing foreclosure. At Pine Crest School he was already filming what he later called the crazy things happening in his backyard. One short, Quicksand, a portrait of his grandfather in the last stage of Alzheimer’s, screened nationally through PBS. His pitches to the New York Times Op-Docs portal came back as polite rejections.

Harvard changed the odds. In the Visual and Environmental Studies programme the South Floridian, born in January 1996, found an adviser in Ross McElwee, whose essay documentaries treat the line between diary and performance as a working tool. Before graduating in 2019 he had placed three shorts with Op-Docs, billed as its youngest contributor. The best known, The Happiest Guy in the World, follows Mario Salcedo, a man who has lived for years aboard Caribbean cruise ships, and premiered at Tribeca in 2018.

His senior thesis became his first feature. Some Kind of Heaven goes behind the gates of The Villages, the sprawling Florida retirement community, and follows four residents for whom the promised paradise is not working, among them a ladies’ man living out of his van while he looks for a wealthy companion. Darren Aronofsky produced it with The New York Times, one of the paper’s first feature-length productions. It premiered at Sundance in 2020 and Magnolia Pictures released it the following year.

The films that followed widened the map without changing the method. Spermworld, made with The New York Times for FX and Hulu, follows three men in the online forums where sperm donors meet would-be parents. Ren Faire, a three-part HBO series executive produced by Josh and Benny Safdie, turned the succession fight at the Texas Renaissance Festival, ruled by its ageing founder George Coulam, into something close to a court drama. Both arrived in 2024. Forbes had already put Oppenheim on its 30 Under 30 list, and his company, To Be Formed, began producing for others, including Xander Robin’s The Python Hunt, a special jury award winner at SXSW in 2025.

Primetime was the leap. The script, by first-time screenwriter Ajon Singh, adapts Luke Dittrich’s 2007 Esquire article about the To Catch a Predator sting that ended in a suicide. Oppenheim came to it sideways: his wife, Abbey, had bought him a Cameo video from Chris Hansen as a joke, he showed it to Pattinson and the producer Brighton McCloskey at a meeting about something else, and a month later McCloskey handed him the script. Pattinson signed on as a producer before he agreed to play Hansen. A24 financed it, Ari Aster‘s Square Peg co-produced, and the film competed for the Golden Lion at Venice before opening in the United States on 25 September 2026 to 18.8 million dollars.

Oppenheim did not abandon his habits on a soundstage. He has said he held no rehearsals with the actors and barely made a shot list, and he describes the film as a fever dream, a collage of every version of Hansen that ever circulated online. “The Odyssey wasn’t told by Odysseus,” he told W magazine. “This movie shouldn’t be told by Chris Hansen.”

That is also where the case against him begins. Hansen, who refused to see the film before release, called it “an insult to the thousands of men and women who work hard every day to protect children”. Critics split along a more interesting line. Pattinson drew raves, the BBC calling it his best performance yet, but David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter found the film flashy but shallow, and the Los Angeles Times judged it remarkably incurious next to David Osit’s documentary Predators, which covered the same television machine without inventing anything. The objection is an old one, sharpened. David Fear wrote in Rolling Stone that Some Kind of Heaven “skirts just south of condescension”. When every frame is composed, the people inside it can start to look like props. Oppenheim knows the risk: “the easiest thing you can do is make a subject look foolish”, he told The Times of Israel, and if you push it, “it becomes mockery very quickly”.

You Can See Everything puts that objection at the centre of the frame. Oppenheim had cold-emailed Nathan Fielder after hearing the comedian had watched part of Some Kind of Heaven; the two became friends, and when Oppenheim learned that Elizabeth Holmes had approached A24 about a documentary, Fielder set up the meeting. They filmed her in secret during the 34 days before she reported to federal prison in May 2023, the crew living in the guest house of the home she shared with her partner, Billy Evans, and kept filming for years afterwards. Amanda Seyfried and Christopher Abbott appear in re-creations of what the cameras could not record. After an unannounced, phones-surrendered screening at Telluride, the film opened on 16 October 2026, and Deadline’s weekend estimates placed it second only to Fahrenheit 9/11 among documentary openings.

The praise has been close to unanimous, and the dissent is precise. Richard Whittaker of The Austin Chronicle wrote that the directors “never really face any consequences for a massive breach of documentary ethics that they treat as a subplot”. Oppenheim has mostly declined to argue. “Keeping it under wraps was very important because we never wanted to get in front of what we were capturing,” he told Variety. “It was always about letting life unfold.”

At 30 he has a fiction film and a documentary in American cinemas at once, and no announced project after them. You Can See Everything holds five nominations at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards on 8 November, including best director for Oppenheim and Fielder, and Primetime opens in Japan on 22 January 2027. Whatever he makes next will be judged on whether the people in front of his camera remain people.

Tags: Robert Pattinson, Nathan Fielder, Primetime, Elizabeth Holmes, Lance Oppenheim, You Can See Everything

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