\n\tOn Nov. 5, 2006, as a camera crew from NBC\u2019s hit tabloid news show To Catch a Predator descended upon his house alongside a seven-man SWAT team, Texas District Attorney Bill Conradt committed suicide with a Browning .380 pistol. He\u2019d been communicating online and via telephone with someone he thought was a 13-year-old boy but was actually an adult working for the vigilante group Perverted Justice. The incident sparked a major lawsuit, and led directly to NBC\u2019s decision to forever pull the plug on To Catch a Predator.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tIt also serves as the climax of the Lance Oppenheim movie Primetime, where Robert Pattinson embodies the role of To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen in such eerie fashion that a Best Actor Oscar nomination is almost a guarantee.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tJoining Pattinson in the movie is an unlikely team of actors, including onetime NBC head Jeff Zucker, former child star Jonathan Lipnicki, The Office\u2018s Creed Bratton,<\/a> and indie-rock star Phoebe Bridgers, in her first acting role.<\/p>\n \n\tFor the role of Bill Conradt, Oppenheim selected Alex Winter<\/a>, who is best known for his portrayal of Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the Bill & Ted trilogy. Over the past 15 years, Winter has directed a series of acclaimed documentaries, including Downloaded, Deep Web: The Untold Story of Bitcoin, Trust Machine: The Story of Blockchain, and The YouTube Effect. Many explore the devastating impact of social media and the internet as a whole on society, and Primetime takes place in a world just on the brink of many of these changes.<\/p>\n \n\tWe caught up with Winter to talk about his sympathetic portrayal of Conradt, working with Oppenheim, his recent Broadway turn in Waiting for Godot alongside Keanu Reeves, and the moment he realized that Oppenheim had secretly been collaborating with Nathan Fielder on You Can See Everything over the past three years.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \n\tHow did you first hear about Primetime? \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n \n\tSo I was a huge fan of the script, and really interested in the character of Bill Conradt right from the jump. I was surprised at the depth of the part. It\u2019s a small part, but there\u2019s a lot there. And I was very fascinated by Bill Conradt.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat about him did you find so fascinating? \n\tAnd then Lance, whose work I loved, his documentaries have a kind of narrative style to them. He\u2019s got a very particular style. So that\u2019s why Bill Conradt was of interest to me, was because of what the movie and Lance was doing with [his story].<\/p>\n \n\tI felt like there was an opportunity to represent this cultural taboo creature in a more human way. And not to exonerate him, but just to present him as an actual human being, which is what is not often the case. And so I just did a lot of research into Bill and his work environment and his life. I talked to DAs and ADAs and other people in the region where he practiced. I\u2019m a character actor by trade and by training, so I love to research and dig into backgrounds, and having a real person to investigate was helpful and interesting.<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n \n\tAs you learned more, did you begin to sympathize with him? \n\tOf course. \n\tSo it was, I felt, an interesting opportunity to portray someone who certainly had very bad flaws, and was operating in a way that was potentially very harmful, but was at the bottom of it all, a human being. And it\u2019s something that I\u2019ve gotten into with my docs quite a bit. So I dealt with it in the Silk Road case and I\u2019ve dealt with it with other documentaries where they\u2019re dealing with characters that are, like most human beings, not black or white.<\/p>\n \n\tIn the scene where Conradt is on the phone with someone he believes to be a child, it really seems like he\u2019s in agony over his own desires, and he knows he\u2019s doing something awful. He\u2019s a tortured person. \n\tBut I do feel the character was tormented. This guy had deep loneliness and inner torment. But as you said, obviously a compulsion, which I was interested in interrogating a little bit. And again, it\u2019s not a piece of activism, it\u2019s acting. So I didn\u2019t do it to plant a flag in the sand or to have a message, but it was gratifying to be able to investigate this person in that way.<\/p>\n \n\tI think Lance had a twofold interest in me \u2014 specifically, one, related to how the public perceives me. When you cut through the computer and you find me on the other end, it could be a real jump scare, which we both knew we were leaning into. \u201cOh, shit, it\u2019s that guy? What the fuck?\u201d You could hear in the screening that we saw, there was an audible gasp in the theater when I appeared. And that\u2019s exactly what Lance wanted.<\/p>\n \n\tBut he also knew my own history with abuse, and he knows I do a lot of stuff outside of my work with group therapy and helping kids in the abuse space. So he knew that I had a pretty deep understanding of the predator-survivor relationship and what that is.<\/p>\n \n\tLance made so many interesting casting choices in this movie with you, Phoebe Bridgers, Creed Bratton, Jeff Zucker, Jonathan Lipnicki. Few people would have predicted them. \n\tAnd so it was helpful to me going into this, because Lance was using the same crew that he\u2019s used on all his docs. He has a very specific creative team. So it was a fairly big movie, but it was shot in a nimble way. And because I knew Lance\u2019s docs, I knew how to plug Bill Conradt into that world in terms of the creating.<\/p>\n \n\tAs the authorities and To Catch a Predator production team are approaching Bill\u2019s house, it starts to feel like a horror movie. You know something awful is about to happen. \n\tBut to your point, it flips the monster, because in a way that whole sequence is set up like, \u201cOh, it\u2019s a horror movie and they\u2019re going to get Hannibal Lecter,\u201d like a scene out of Silence of the Lambs with all the cops descending on that house. But of course, the monster ends up being Chris Hansen.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s amazing that the film kind of makes the audience feel bad for a wannabe child molester.\u00a0 \n\tBill needed professional help before he hurt a child. He didn\u2019t need an NBC camera team swooping into his house. \n\tBut from my perspective, it will help survivors if we humanize predators. That\u2019s the biggest problem I have with shows like To Catch a Predator, which I caught up on once I was doing research for this film. I was like, \u201cOh, well, this isn\u2019t really helping either.\u201d It\u2019s not really helping the survivors and it\u2019s certainly not helping the predators. It\u2019s not really providing any kind of service other than pure, low-hanging fruit, vigilante justice for TV ratings. That\u2019s all it is.<\/p>\n \n\tI\u2019m sure you see this movie as a piece with Deep Web, Downloaded, The YouTube Effect, and a lot of your other work. They all fit together. \n\tYeah. You\u2019ve often explored the early days of new technologies like Napster and YouTube, and how they grew and changed in terrible ways nobody would have expected. \n\tThere was so much great promise in the early days of the web. We were told it would democratize information, and give people all over the world a top-class education in history, language, culture, philosophy. Everyone would have the greatest works of art at their fingertips. It didn\u2019t play out like that at all.
My agent got a call from Francine Maisler, the casting director, saying that Lance was interested in talking to me about that role. And I knew of Lance through his documentary work quite well. Obviously he knew my acting stuff, but we knew each other from the doc space, which is tiny. There\u2019s like six people in that space.<\/p>\n
I wasn\u2019t familiar with [To Catch a Predator]. It just wasn\u2019t my world. It was on at a time when I wasn\u2019t checked into that kind of TV. So I had missed the whole phenomenon. But the script was such a shrewd examination of media right at that nexus point before the internet happened, which, I\u2019ve made a lot of movies about this exact thing. So topically, the way our culture deals with sexual abuse and predators is of interest to me, and something I\u2019ve tackled with the Showbiz Kids doc and have my own personal history<\/a> in that space.<\/p>\n
I mean, I come into these things with a sympathy for all sides. Because these are all people, and they\u2019re people who need help, whether they\u2019re survivors or predators, they both need help. Most of the time, neither of them are getting help. So I\u2019d say I come into it with empathy and some degree of sympathy from the get-go \u2014 certainly empathy from the start, sympathy depending on the case. I\u2019d say I have less sympathy for someone like Harvey Weinstein.<\/p>\n
But with Conradt, I did sympathize. It seemed like a very tragic case that involved coercion and a kind of grotesque throwing to the lions for the sake of ratings, a desperation for greater ratings, and very little nuance and examination of human beings involved.<\/p>\n
Yeah. Lance\u2019s documentaries, he calls them \u201cdocufantasias.\u201d So there\u2019s a dreamlike, fantasy quality to the world he\u2019s representing, and the portrayal of Chris Hansen. Certainly, the way I came at Conradt, I wasn\u2019t trying to be Bill Conradt; it wasn\u2019t a biography of Bill. So there\u2019s other stuff going on in the character I\u2019m playing that isn\u2019t related to him and specifically trying to litigate his story.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s right. And what I love about Lance is that he\u2019s not being meta for meta\u2019s sake. He\u2019s going after people to get really deep performances out of them. I mean, Creed is amazing in the film, I think. He\u2019s so good, and it\u2019s such a powerful scene. It is really like a scene out of Lance\u2019s docs, though. It\u2019s like a scene out of Ren Faire<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Yeah. I could tell while we were shooting that sequence what the vibe of it was going to be. And obviously we shot a lot more than is in the movie. But I think they used the perfect amount. So the stuff that\u2019s gone of mine, I was actually happy to see gone. But yeah, his approach was very specific, and the thing about him is he knows what he wants, so it was fun to work on in that way.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yeah. Honestly, that was important to me, and it\u2019s something I discussed with Lance. I wanted people to sympathize with Bill. Again, it doesn\u2019t mean that you exonerate him, but I felt like if I could have some small part in creating a little bit of a tweak within the cultural understanding of these people, especially in the sort of post-Epstein world we\u2019re in now, where it\u2019s become so caricatured and politicized. At the end of the day, really, they are just people and they really do need help. And so I really did want people to sympathize with Bill. I mean, I won\u2019t lie there.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Yeah, exactly. He needed some help and he probably would\u2019ve survived had he had it, and everyone would\u2019ve been better off and it wouldn\u2019t have been like we were unleashing a monster on the world. But we have a long way to go culturally before we\u2019re there, I think. And some people said to me, some of my friends, \u201cIs it odd for you as a survivor playing a predator?\u201d It\u2019s not, because I\u2019m an actor and I\u2019m playing a character. I\u2019m not doing therapy through my acting work. I do therapy with a therapist.<\/p>\n
And Showbiz Kids. That\u2019s kind of a biographical story told through other people, all of whom had experienced severe trauma within their work as child actors. So it\u2019s an interesting nexus point for me. The internet, the exploitation of people via media, how society responds to media, and also the birth of the discourse that gave rise to online communities and the discourse online, all of that is in this movie, which is so rich.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I think that the early days of the open net and even the early days of the web were pretty great. There was a freewheeling, democratized nature to them before they were really co-opted by big corporate interests and oligarchs, and also weaponized so that you had this hyper-angry discourse. I mean, that\u2019s what The YouTube Effect is about. It\u2019s where the internet ended up and how it was weaponized.<\/p>\n
I mean, it did break a lot of barriers down. It did create ways for people all over the world who didn\u2019t have access to information and knowledge to get access to information and knowledge. Of course, what we\u2019re seeing now with the land rush into AI is \u2014 and we saw it happen with music, we\u2019ve seen it happen with movies \u2014 the theft of people\u2019s works. Now you have all of the authors, all of the journalists, all of the text in the world is just being fed into these LLMs and then sold off by other people without helping the people who actually created this stuff. So I think we\u2019ve landed at the worst of the worst of the worst of where this all could have ended up.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n