Chris Hansen says he wasn't consulted and turned down an NDA screening, while the film reimagines a Texas police raid that ended in suicide.
Robert Pattinson plays Chris Hansen in Primetime, and the real Hansen wants everyone to know he had nothing to do with the film. Director Lance Oppenheim offered him a screening under a nondisclosure agreement. Hansen turned it down, and he's since said publicly that much of what's in the trailer simply didn't happen.
So what did happen? The film is built around a real, well-documented operation. To Catch a Predator ran as part of Dateline, working with the online group Perverted Justice and local police to lure men into decoy houses using chat logs as bait, cameras rolling the whole time. That workflow checks out. The show existed, the method existed, the cameras were real.
The climax of Primetime is also grounded in something that actually happened. In Fairfield, Texas, in November 2006, the team identified a suspect who never showed up at the decoy house: an assistant district attorney named Louis Conradt, called 'Bill' in the film and played by Alex Winter. Police and the TV crew went to his home instead to serve a warrant. Conradt died by suicide as officers approached.
That part isn't fiction. His estate later sued NBC for more than USD 100 million, a case that was eventually settled out of court. The county DA declined to prosecute the other men caught in that same sting. The show itself got cancelled in 2008. A24 and Oppenheim have pointed to Luke Dittrich's 2007 Esquire piece, Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die, as the film's starting point.
Where the film invents things
Here's where Primetime stops being a record and starts being what Oppenheim has called 'docufantasia.' The raid itself, the most reported change, is staged at night in a storm, squad lights flashing, tension cranked up. The real thing happened in the morning, under clear skies. No drama, just procedure, which is arguably scarier.
There's a scene where the decoy character 'Dan,' played by Skyler Gisondo, tries to keep the suspect talking by singing a song from Rent. Nice beat for a film. Not in any police report anywhere.
Most of the people around Hansen in the film aren't real either, at least not as individuals. Producer 'Andie Bender,' played by Merritt Wever, is a composite, not a portrait of an actual staffer. The same goes for much of the crew. And the film includes an extramarital affair for its 'Hansen' character, shot with split screens and ominous scoring that clearly signal invention rather than reportage.
A24 has been upfront that this isn't meant to be scene-by-scene fact. It's a fictionalised drama using a real, ugly incident to ask questions about how far television will go for ratings. Whether that argument holds when the man at the centre of the based-on events wasn't even shown a cut is the debate that's likely to follow Primetime through its theatrical run.
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