Robert Pattinson told Chris Hansen he hopes he likes Primetime, after Hansen criticized Pattinson’s portrayal from the trailer. The exchange landed at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, where the film is set to premiere before an audience that has already watched the dispute form in public.
Pattinson used the press conference to answer the criticism directly: “Obviously, I hope he likes the movie.” He added, “There’s something electrifying about him. I would hope the amount of inspiration his character has given a lot of people for years is some kind of compliment.”
Venice Film Festival on Saturday
Primetime premieres on Saturday afternoon at the Venice Film Festival, with the film’s subject already objecting to the way he is being played. Hansen said he has not seen the movie because he declined to sign a standard NDA from A24, so his response has been limited to the trailer rather than the finished film.
That leaves Pattinson discussing a role before the first public screening, which is rare even by festival standards. He also said, “There’s a strange alchemy — something he’s doing is the reason people are still talking about that show 20 years later.”
Chris Hansen and To Catch
Hansen said the trailer made Pattinson’s portrayal seem “overly dramatic,” while also saying his family seem to think it’s “a pretty good imitation.” That split is the sharpest part of this dispute: the criticism is already public, but so is the acknowledgment that the portrayal may land differently with people close to the subject than it does with the subject himself.
Primetime is directed by Lance Oppenheim in his narrative feature debut and is loosely based on the 2007 Esquire article Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die. Set in the mid-2000s, it follows Hansen as he turns the pursuit of suspected child predators into primetime entertainment, a premise that puts journalism, policing and entertainment in the same frame. Lance Oppenheim has said he discovered To Catch a Predator through parodies on South Park and ebaum's World, which fits the film’s uneasy path from broadcast phenomenon to movie material.
Phoebe Bridgers Debut
Phoebe Bridgers makes her acting debut in Primetime as a decoy, and she said filming was “super intimidating,” recalling that she told Lance Oppenheim, “No way, dude,” when he asked her to join. Her presence adds another layer to a movie already built around public roles, performance and the gap between a person’s image and the version others imitate.
The cleanest read is that Hansen’s early objection may become part of the film’s publicity whether he likes it or not. Pattinson has now framed the portrayal as a kind of tribute to a figure whose presence still draws attention, and Saturday’s screening will show whether the movie can survive that argument on its own terms.
