Robert Pattinson wants Chris Hansen to like “Primetime,” a tense thriller about the television journalist and “To Catch a Predator” host, which premieres on Saturday afternoon at the Venice Film Festival.
“Obviously, I hope he likes the movie,” Pattinson said on Saturday’s Venice Film Festival press conference. “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.”
Directed by Lance Oppenheim in his narrative feature debut, “Primetime” is set in the mid-2000s and follows Hansen, then the host of Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator,” as he turns the pursuit of suspected child predators into primetime entertainment. Loosely based on the 2007 “Esquire” article “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” the movie exposes the ethical limits of Hansen’s methods and the collision between journalism, policing and entertainment. “To Catch a Predator” ultimately ended in 2008 after facing some backlash over its methods of confronting the suspects.
“There’s something magnetic about his presence. I watched the show when I was younger and didn’t think about it,” Pattinson said. “There’s a strange alchemy — something he’s doing is the reason people are still talking about that show 20 years later. It’s not to do solely with the subject matter. It was something about the show that was groundbreaking, but then he’s someone centering it. There’s something, even after watching literally thousands of hours of it, you can’t put your finger on it.”
Pattinson was joined at Saturday’s press conference by Oppenheim and co-stars Skyler Gisondo, Merritt Wever and Phoebe Bridgers. Pattinson praised Bridgers, the Grammy-winning singer and songwriter who makes her acting debut as a decoy in “Primetime.”
“She’s unbelievable,” Pattinson said. “I didn’t even know Lance and Phoebe were friends. When he suggested her, I was like ‘Phoebe Bridgers? Why don’t we get the Queen?’ Even on the first day, she was so relaxed. She didn’t seem nervous at all. She completely got the tone, and it’s a relatively difficult movie.”
Bridgers, for her part, described the filming process as “super intimidating.”
Oppenheim, 30, is best known for documentaries like “Some Kind of Heaven,” “Spermworld” and the HBO series “Ren Faire.” He remembers discovering “To Catch a Predator,” not through the show itself but through parodies on “South Park” and comedy website Ebaum’s World. He’s described “Primetime” as a “docu-fantasia.”
Pattinson is having quite a year, starring in box office hits like “The Drama” and Christopher Nolan’s summer blockbuster “The Odyssey” as well as Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming “Dune: Part III.” And his schedule isn’t mellowing any time soon: Pattinson traveled to Venice from London, where he’s filming “The Batman: Part II.”
But he joked that after filming projects back-to-back-to-back, he noticed his characters were blending together.
“I can definitely hear a little Chris Hansen in ‘The Odyssey’ when I watch it,” he said with a laugh.
