{"id":630716,"date":"2026-08-10T19:52:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T19:52:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/630716\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T19:52:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T19:52:15","slug":"the-to-catch-a-predator-doc-director-reacts-to-primetime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/630716\/","title":{"rendered":"The \u2018To Catch a Predator\u2019 Doc Director Reacts to \u2018Primetime\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Paramount+, A24\n <\/p>\n

There\u2019s a peculiar feedback loop humming around To Catch a Predator right now. The latest trailer<\/a> for Primetime<\/a>, Lance Oppenheim\u2019s A24 film about Chris Hansen, dropped last week and looks absolutely bananas: Robert Pattinson (adding to his freaky repertoire of incredible voices<\/a>) appears to play Hansen as pure megalomaniac, drunk on the success of his Dateline NBC segment to a point where he is seemingly imbued with a strange, almost divine sense of purpose. What\u2019s wild about this treatment is not only that the real-life Hansen is just very much still with us but that he continues to do his thing of stinging child predators and riding the robust digital true-crime wave.<\/p>\n

For the uninitiated, To Catch a Predator, which ran from 2004 to \u201908, involved producers posing as minors online, using decoy actors to lure men to staged houses, then filming Hansen confronting them (\u201cYou see how this looks, right?\u201d) alongside local police. It became a cultural phenomenon, and its primal appeal \u2014 watching a suspected predator\u2019s life virtually end onscreen as entertainment \u2014 has proved remarkably durable. Online, the show has become an odd culture tentpole: a source of memes, multiple generations of fandom, archival obsession, and copycat vigilante operations.<\/p>\n

Primetime will mark the second revisit of the phenomenon in recent years. David Osit\u2019s documentary Predators<\/a>, which premiered at Sundance in 2025 before landing on Paramount+ to strong reviews, covered the same subject with a quieter approach, probing Hansen\u2019s methods, the ethics of watching, the sting operation that ultimately led to the segment\u2019s cancellation, and its long afterlife online. Osit is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse himself who makes his own conflicted response to consuming To Catch a Predator part of the story. The documentary ended up proving divisive; Osit says that after its release, he started getting messages accusing him of defending pedophiles, a reaction that only sharpened his interest in empathy itself being something audiences distrust when directed at people judged to be irredeemable.<\/p>\n

And now there\u2019s Primetime, tagged as \u201cInspired by True Events.\u201d Oppenheim, himself a documentarian (Spermworld, Ren Faire<\/a>) is making his first leap into narrative filmmaking, transforming the same source material into fiction. With such a different take on the subject set to enter the world, Osit discussed how he feels about the prospect of Primetime, the enduring fascination with To Catch a Predator, and the aftermath of Predators.<\/p>\n

Have you seen the trailer for Primetime?<\/strong>
I don\u2019t think so. I have seen the film, though.<\/p>\n

Oh, you have! Did Oppenheim reach out to you as part of research?<\/strong>
<\/strong>I can\u2019t give context as to how they reached out to me, but I know Lance and a few members of the team, and what I can say on the record is that they asked me to watch a cut before they finished it.<\/p>\n

Acknowledging that I\u2019m putting you in a sensitive position here, what thoughts can you share at this point about what you saw?<\/strong>
Well, just as a documentary filmmaker, it\u2019s wild to make a nonfiction project over a couple of years and then see a lot of that story transformed into a fictional world. I\u2019d never had that experience before. It was probably one of the most interesting professional experiences of my life, sitting and watching that film. I probably can\u2019t say much more than that, but I\u2019ll say it was fascinating to watch.<\/p>\n

That kind of loops into one of the ideas in Predators, which is the tension in packaging what\u2019s positioned as news or documentary as a pure entertainment commodity. I imagine watching Primetime, then, can only be quite the trip.<\/strong>
I\u2019ve never questioned more than I did while making Predators why we watch what we watch, and what we\u2019re supposed to glean from it or not. That became front of mind during the process. The resulting film is very much about the audience, about filmmaking, about the act of documentation. And it\u2019s kind of gauche to do that in a fiction film, you know? Abbas Kiarostami did that in Taste of Cherry, which befuddled certain audiences<\/a> but then also won the Palme d\u2019Or in 1997. That\u2019s sort of my experience with Predators. The film premiered at Sundance, got a lot of wonderful attention, then dropped on Paramount+ two weeks after the Epstein Files Transparency Act. After that, I\u2019d get an email a day telling me I should kill myself, that I was a predator, that someone should check my hard drive.<\/p>\n

So much of the film, for me and my peers, is an examination of the media \u2014 how we tell stories, how we become part of stories, or don\u2019t. That\u2019s why I gradually became a character in it. There\u2019s a lot going on, and I think there\u2019s a level of media literacy that doesn\u2019t extend to people watching just the next true-crime doc on their Paramount+ feed.<\/p>\n

Tell me about those emails.<\/strong>
The vast majority of the frustration \u2014 and I\u2019m paraphrasing here \u2014 was with the idea that I was asking people to empathize with pedophiles. That stunned me, because that\u2019s not what I feel I was doing, and it\u2019s still not the point. You might find yourself, watching Predators, feeling empathy for people who\u2019ve done bad things. But no one\u2019s ever convinced me that empathy is in itself bad. It doesn\u2019t mean we don\u2019t punish bad behavior or try to stop it. It means we can understand where it comes from or be frustrated that, in the case of child predation, predators are often themselves victims of child molestation or predation when they were younger. It\u2019s this awful cycle. That people would get upset over the idea that they felt any emotion, or that I was asking them to feel any emotion, I found staggering.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll say what I\u2019ve said in every interview since Predators came out, because it\u2019s still true: Nothing is more evil than child predation as far as we\u2019re concerned as a society. It\u2019s a pretty binary thing to us. That often means we don\u2019t interrogate why it happens, how it happens, the different types of crime involved. What To Catch a Predator did was lump all those criminals into something we could enjoy and commodify. What we enjoyed wasn\u2019t the commission of the crime; it was the punishment of the potential criminal. That\u2019s really what I found worth critiquing. I could not have imagined that some people\u2019s takeaway would be that the film is pro-pedophile, which I\u2019ve seen people call it. It speaks to how empathy is seen as weakness in our society. It\u2019s actually a strength. I think I\u2019m stronger than someone who refuses to empathize with a person who\u2019s done wrong.<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t realized before watching Predators that there\u2019s a whole ecosystem of copycats, but given the lucrative true-crime economy, maybe I shouldn\u2019t be surprised.\u00a0<\/strong>
It makes sense, right? Twenty years ago, before To Catch a Predator aired, people couldn\u2019t become their own content creators. The technology didn\u2019t exist and neither did the drive. There was Xanga; there was MySpace; YouTube had just begun. \u201cMe at the Zoo,\u201d the first YouTube video, came out just a few months after the first episode of To Catch a Predator aired. This was before the Arab Spring, before people realized the power and reach of social media. But it also took place in an era when we were all still fluent on the internet. We forget there was a brief period when the internet was already huge and everywhere, everyone had it \u2014 it just wasn\u2019t social yet. So it only makes sense that now that everyone can be their own content creator, enterprising individuals would re-create the shows of their youth.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s an easy formula to re-create. To Catch a Predator doesn\u2019t take much work. The only real issue was legal, which the original show got around by claiming newsworthiness; they didn\u2019t have to blur faces. As for lawsuits, very few people wanted to spend their own money on an attorney and draw more attention to their case and to their name being public as a potential predator, so a lot of people didn\u2019t even contest what happened to them on the show. We see potential child predators as subhuman, and we don\u2019t much care what happens to them. It feeds a societal urge we all feel: We want our communities to be safe. That\u2019s why you can show ten people my film, and five will say the copycats are heroes, and five will say they\u2019re evil. And the thing is, no one\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

When you started developing Predators, what was animating you?<\/strong>
I\u2019d been fascinated by To Catch a Predator for years, but I never thought, I want to make a movie about this. Then I went online and discovered the fandom community for the show, which was not only still devoted to it more than 20 years later but had spent those two decades filing FOIA requests, compiling raw footage, collecting decoy calls and interrogation footage. Watching that raw footage was a huge hook for me. It gave the material a complexity that felt completely different from watching the show.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d read a chat log and think, This man\u2019s a monster. Then I\u2019d watch his raw footage and feel for him. Then I\u2019d read the log again and find him monstrous again. I kept going back and forth. I thought, What if I could give that experience to an audience \u2014\u00a0the same one I was having as a new father at the time? What if I could build a film with that discomfort as its spine, where you\u2019re never sure where you stand on something that otherwise feels settled? Then, as I looked further, I realized Chris Hansen was still doing his thing and that there were all these copycats. It seemed like there was a whole story here \u2014 not just as a history of To Catch a Predator but how it was the beginning, in many ways, of an entire media movement. It birthed true-crime television in a certain way, and it was one of the first times journalism and law enforcement worked together to create entertainment. Cops doesn\u2019t count. There\u2019s no story in Cops. To Catch a Predator was pitched as journalism. It aired on a news program; it wasn\u2019t its own show. What\u2019s the line in the trailer? \u201cWe\u2019re going to be bigger \u2026 ?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to be bigger than Lost.\u201d<\/strong>
Yeah, something like that. This was Dateline NBC. The fact that it was wrapped in the trappings of journalism makes it much clearer how we got into the mess we\u2019re in now with modern journalism.<\/p>\n

You also turned inward, drawing from your own history as a survivor.<\/strong>
I felt almost a burden to include an umbrella story in this film. I\u2019m asking people to go back and forth and sit with complicated feelings. But when you do that in a film, the question becomes, Does the director have complicated feelings too? Directors are so often anonymous. They don\u2019t exist within the documentary, or they do as the voice of God narrating the whole thing. Very rarely is the director something in between. I thought, What would happen if that became part of the story too? How would it change what you\u2019re watching if you understood something about why the film was being made?<\/p>\n

So you considered not inserting yourself at some point.<\/strong>
I certainly didn\u2019t want to.<\/p>\n

How has your relationship with Predators and the material changed since its premiere?<\/strong>
If I had the mental or emotional bandwidth, I would revisit this in some way and try to create some project where I could parse where different members of different audiences decide that the film has gone too far for them, or lost them, or become, in their words, sympathetic to pedophiles, or too pro-pedophile, or something. It\u2019s fascinating to read Letterboxd. I\u2019ll see comments sitting right next to each other: someone calling the last 15 minutes of the film some of the most incredible they\u2019ve seen, someone else calling those same 15 minutes some of the worst.<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t lie, though \u2014 I\u2019m disappointed when people land on such a simple, wrong conclusion that the film just wants you to feel bad for predators. It\u2019s such an unfortunate reading of the film, but it makes sense. These people may be faced with something that they\u2019ve never been faced with before, which is the idea that a human being is not necessarily as bad as the worst thing they\u2019ve ever done or thought. Or with the idea that we live in a society, top to bottom, where expressing empathy is treated as weakness. That\u2019s built into our political culture right now, and the film is asking for an alternative. For me, as a survivor or whatever you want to call it of some of the worst things that can happen to a child, it\u2019s stronger to stay curious than to shut out the world and want to burn down the structures that hurt me instead of interrogating them. I\u2019m proud of that.<\/p>\n

What do you make of To Catch a Predator becoming a kind of meme online?<\/strong>
I think the show made people laugh in an uncomfortable way when it first aired. People hadn\u2019t seen anything like it before. The persona Chris Hansen adopts on the show \u2014 my film gets into this, and I\u2019m positive Primetime addresses it too \u2014 is funny, and bleak, but also safe. And memes are kind of the provenance of privilege. You get to enjoy anonymity when you\u2019re making one.<\/p>\n

Were you surprised Chris Hansen had you <\/strong>on his podcast<\/strong><\/a>? After all, Predators was essentially a critique of his whole thing.<\/strong>
Have you ever heard the expression \u201cAll press is good press\u201d? I haven\u2019t discussed it directly with Chris, but I\u2019d imagine he\u2019s a subscriber to that mentality.<\/p>\n

Do you wish he were a little more introspective about all this?<\/strong>
I wish all of us were more introspective about everything.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s fair. Let\u2019s circle back to Primetime. I\u2019m intrigued that Lance Oppenheim, who was a documentarian up to this point, made this leap into narrative filmmaking. Are you interested in doing the same?<\/strong>
I would love to, but I have some hangups to get over first. I have convinced myself that I like working with reality and doing things within what\u2019s real. I also don\u2019t know if I want to work with actors; I\u2019ve heard that\u2019s a prerequisite to most fiction projects. I\u2019ve always had an idea to do a serious body-swap movie \u2014\u00a0like Freaky Friday but it\u2019s a proper Dardenne-brothers-style drama with no one laughing. A <\/strong>social drama that just happens to include a body swap \u2014 that\u2019s my dream film.<\/p>\n

Last question: You\u2019ve said you\u2019ve seen the film. What did you think of Robert Pattinson\u2019s Chris Hansen voice?<\/strong>
Well, he\u2019s a talented actor.<\/p>\n

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