Lance Oppenheim

EO

I was poking around and realized you haven’t done much press, and for the things you have done no one has been able to position or introduce you yet.

LO

I'm not sure I have anything interesting to say. Or I say too much and regret it later.

EO

Should we take it from the top? Who is Lance Oppenheim from Fort Lauderdale, Florida?

LO

Yeah, we can start from the beginning. As a kid, I was very uncoordinated and really bad at sports. If I went to a hockey game and heard the buzzer I’d practically shit myself. I also grew up about forty-five minutes from every friend I had in middle school and high school… So I loved watching movies as comfort. The first real gateway drug for me, the thing I watched over and over and wanted to live inside of, was Vanilla Sky. I saw it when I was eleven years old and I couldn't get it out of my head. It felt like a dream that never ended.

EO

I’m curious about the storytelling part of your career. Because I was reading the language that accompanied the Op-Docs series for The New York Times, it felt really clear to me that you knew what you were doing structurally. You read like an editor to me. When I read that language I thought: Oh, this person understands language, pacing, and tone. Where did you find your voice?

LO

I think when you're cutting your own stuff, you learn really quickly that editing is writing. I don't edit alone anymore. I work with editors I trust enormously, who have become essential collaborators. But when you're editing documentaries you're basically screenwriting. You’re taking these huge lumps of reality and all this stuff that doesn’t make sense and you’re trying to break it apart and reshape it until it resembles the experience of the person you’re making the film about.

EO

When did documentary become the language you wanted to work in?

LO

A lot of that came back to Kubrick. In his twenties he was a photographer and a documentarian, making documentaries before he arrived as the Kubrick we think about now. He made a few scripted movies before Killer’s Kiss, but even those early films were overlooked at the time.

I loved that this filmmaker, whose movies don't even feel like movies in the traditional sense, came out of documentary and photography. 2001 doesn’t feel like a scripted movie to me. It moves in cycles. It moves in phases. It’s almost cylindrical or something. What got me was that he came from a place of reality, of observing and assembling and putting things together.

I knew I loved fiction movies. That’s what I loved watching. But I also knew there was so much bullshit involved in getting scripts made and getting movies financed and getting things off the ground. So documentaries started to feel like a way into figuring out what I actually wanted to do. I was fifteen or sixteen and I remember thinking: let me just see if I can do this. What I loved was the idea that I could identify a world or a setting or a character that interested me and I didn’t actually have to invent anything. It’s their life. It’s their world. But I could shape it cinematically. That became really exciting to me.

EO

Once you knew documentary was the path, how did you begin developing your own language?

LO

Later, when I was in high school, I started reading creative nonfiction. Then I started watching more documentaries and realizing that there had actually been this different tradition of documentary filmmaking, especially in the sixties, when documentaries were harder to make and people were scripting and constructing them much more. Iranian cinema…

Robert Flaherty became huge for me. So did On the Bowery. I started realizing that somewhere along the way we’d shrunk documentaries down into this idea that if you simply observed reality faithfully and assembled it honestly then somehow that represented truth. But often those films didn’t feel cinematic to me. They didn’t feel like movies.

I kept asking myself: how do I make something closer to the narrative nonfiction that I’m reading and loving right now? How do I make something that makes my brain feel like it’s on fire? So I just started doing it. A few things I made alone, and then I started pulling in friends from high school. And I loved it.

EO

How did that actually happen though? What did assembling people around you feel like? How did you know who to bring in?

LO

In high school it was really just: who’s down? Who wants to go see The Master with me at the Gateway Theater in Fort Lauderdale? Who wants to come to the Everglades after school on Friday because we’re going to follow this group of former nail technicians who are stealing dogs back from people who stole them?

And people would just say yes. My friend Josh Aronson, who’s a great photographer, was there. My friend Barron Roth was there, another friend Mirella Cardoso who’s an actor now was there too. There was this whole little ecosystem of people who were all interested in making things and experimenting and figuring things out together. Back then we were all just kids who wanted to make stuff. That mattered enormously. It's where I realized I loved documentaries and the process of making them.

EO

Did you have a moment where you realized what kind of filmmaker you wanted to be?

LO

I think everybody likes movies. Everybody wants to escape into something. There were a lot of years where I was trying to figure out what my actual style was, how I liked working and what felt most effective. I made more things and some of it I wasn't thrilled with, but I loved the process. Then I made one project that was the closest thing to a true observational documentary, and the people in it didn’t feel it accurately represented their experience. After that process I remember thinking very clearly: I don’t want to make anything where people can’t engage in the making of it. I want to make the people in the movies to feel like they’re a part of the telling of it, and for the films themselves to feel truly cinematic - quotidian, human dramas that are shot like old Hollywood movies. And the more I went down this route, the more I realized too that I was capturing a different kind of truth - maybe something even more honest, where the people in the films are aware of the camera’s presence, and performing scenes from their everyday lives… Even if something is embarrassing or difficult or vulnerable, as long as it’s honest and they feel like the aesthetics are representing them in a way they can get behind, then that’s okay.

They’ve seen the references I'm talking about, they know the crew, they've heard the music that will probably end up in the film. I keep working with the same composer, and they get to talk to him too. Then it starts feeling less like extraction and more like we’re all part of this weird artistic troupe that’s making something inspired by the events unfolding in their lives while those events are unfolding.

EO

So what was the first project where that clicked for you? Because I was actually curious about Long Term Parking.

LO

Yes. The Happiest Guy in the World. That was definitely the first one. There's obviously the whole David Foster Wallace thing, the shadow of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is all over it. I hate to admit how influential that was because it feels almost embarrassingly obvious now, but I loved it and I’ll wear it on my sleeve.

EO

We love David Foster Wallace. I took a class on his literary essays my freshman year and it changed everything.

LO

Exactly. That was the first project where I remember thinking: I love this process.,With that one, I was looking at the gap between someone who calls himself the happiest guy in the world and the fact that the people he calls family are employees. But trying to inhabit how he experienced his own life became really exciting to me. The aesthetics and the emotional register of it all felt very close to writing a screenplay. It became expression instead of observation.

EO

There were inklings of your signature cinematic language in it too.

LO

Definitely. We were using Steadicam. We were using movement. I kept asking: how do you make something as operatic as living permanently on a cruise ship actually feel operatic? How do you make it feel as big and strange as it actually is? That was really the shift for me.

EO

So explain Harvard to me.

LO

I went there for undergrad. When I was in highschool, I had heard there was some kind of film program there. When my sister was there she introduced me to this photographer and professor named Chris Killip, who was incredible. He passed away a few years ago, but he was one of the great documentary photographers. My sister basically said, you should meet this guy, I think you'd really like him.

EO

How old were you?

LO

Seventeen maybe.

EO

Did you visit her a lot?

LO

No, I think I only went once. But my sister and I are really close and she set it up. He was amazing, and through him I found this whole film program hidden inside Harvard that almost nobody knew about. It was primarily a documentary program and a lot of the same people had been teaching there for decades. Ross McElwee was there, who made Sherman’s March, which was hugely important to me and sort of established this pre-Michael Moore version of the first-person documentary where the filmmaker becomes a character in the work..

Then there was Robb Moss and Alfred Guzzetti and Ruth Lingford and all these working filmmakers who were actively making things while teaching. It wasn’t a film studies program where you sat around watching movies and dreamed about making movies someday. It was production based. There were incredible visiting filmmakers too. Dennis Lim was teaching when I was there. So was Guy Maddin. Leos Carax had taught there before me. There was this really strange and wonderful ecosystem around filmmaking that felt very different from what I imagined film school to be.

What I loved most was that very few people there actually arrived saying, “I want to become a filmmaker.” Most of the people in those classes were pre-med students or statistics majors, or people who had burned out on whatever path they were on and wandered in because they wanted to do something entirely different. Nobody was trying to make a Christopher Nolan movie or a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. Everyone was just saying: I don’t know what I want to do yet, but I want to get a camera in my hands and figure it out. For me that was kind of perfect.

I arrived already knowing that I wanted to make movies. I'd already made short films and I just wanted resources: institutional money I could put into projects, then come back to campus and edit them. By the end of college I had figured out how to play it a little and it almost stopped feeling like school. It felt more like an artist residency. By senior year I had started making the short film that would eventually become Some Kind of Heaven and I was able to treat that work as part of my academics. I’d make something and then bring it back and show it to these incredible filmmakers who would critique it and challenge it and help shape it into something better. I loved it.

EO

So school made you hustle because of what it showed you was possible?

LO

Exactly. There were also filmmakers who had come out of that program who meant a lot to me. Darren Aronofsky was one of them. I found his email through the Harvard directory and emailed him once every semester from freshman year onward. He never replied. Then finally during senior year his assistant wrote back and basically said: “I’ve seen your Op-Docs. Stop emailing Darren. Email me instead. What do you want?” I sent over the sizzle reel for the feature and eventually they came aboard. That felt representative of Harvard too. It wasn’t pre-professional. It was philosophical, but it was also deeply practical.

EO

At the same time, were you still wondering whether you wanted to work on the studio side?

LO

There was a period where I was asking myself: okay, if filmmaking doesn’t work out, could I do something on the studio side? What does that life actually look like? My sister had already graduated by then and one of her friends had gotten a job at A24 in the business department. I got to know him and I kept saying, “dude, I would do anything to intern there.” This was before Moonlight. I ended up getting an internship reading scripts and doing coverage.

EO

But what did LA actually teach you? We both took a gap year before college, and for me it completely clarified what I wanted out of it. Going back to school after that felt like an assassination mission. Did it have the same effect on you?

LO

It did. By the end of LA I knew I didn't want to work on the studio side. I loved watching how decisions got made and I loved reading scripts and seeing what projects people were excited about, but I also realized that most of the best stuff wasn’t getting made anyway. During the day I was reading scripts and at night I was shooting a documentary about a football player named Kahlil Bell who was trying to renegotiate his contract and stay in the NFL.

EO

This is sounding eerily similar to Kapernick.

LO

He’d been cut from his team and was living in this perpetual off-season where he refused to believe it was over. He was living out of trash bags in his apartment and training all day and saying over and over again: “it’s not over, it’s not over, it’s not over.” That's what I was making in LA, and it's where I met David Bolen, my cinematographer, who I've worked with ever since.

EO

I was going to say, you guys almost grew up together professionally. How were your weeks actually structured? Was it like a three-day internship? What was the rhythm?

LO

I was interning at two production companies, reading scripts and doing coverage. I was working four days a week and then on the fifth day I was working on my own film. Then that summer I moved to New York and was reading scripts at A24 while also working at Nylon making digital content and editing things for them.

Honestly, when I came into college, I was kind of a little asshole. I was like, “I know exactly what I want to do. I have a Vimeo Staff Pick. This is the path.” Which of course is ridiculous because nobody cares about that stuff. In some ways college was amazing because everyone around me was basically saying: “dude, get over yourself.” And they were right. My worldview started broadening because suddenly I wasn’t only around filmmakers and artists twenty-four hours a day. I was around people with completely different interests and ambitions and ways of seeing the world.

EO

So college ended up changing you as much as it developed you as a filmmaker?

LO

By the time I came out the other side I felt much more formed as a person. I still wanted to make films and I still wanted to do that full time, but I also understood there was more to life than just work. Every time I finish something I feel exactly the same way: “okay, great, now what?” The experience of making it and the people I made it with end up mattering infinitely more than the thing itself. Most of the time while I’m making something I’m stressed anyway.

EO

Tell me about crossing into the second half of college though, because suddenly you’re making the Op-Docs and those start feeling much closer to movies. Were you making movies in your head the whole time and documentaries were simply the path toward them?

LO

Yeah, well when I was in high school I started treating Vimeo almost like a game. Back then a Vimeo Staff Pick had enormous power for emerging and established filmmakers alike. People were literally getting Hollywood movies made off Vimeo Staff Picks. The Daniels came out of that world. Kristoffer Borgli was somebody I encountered through that world. Henry Dunham too. I was deep in Vimeo and deep on the KanyeToThe forums, where Brockhampton eventually came together. I was obsessed with Kanye, and trying to getting my movies seen, and get them to cut through online.

I would basically spam everybody. I would find the email addresses of the Vimeo Staff Pick curators and pretend they had picked an earlier film of mine, then write something like, “thanks so much for picking the last one, here’s the new one.” Most of the time people ignored it, but occasionally it worked. The New York Times happened exactly the same way. There was this journalist there, Lindsey Crouse, who I emailed over and over because I loved the Op-Docs. They didn’t feel journalistic to me. They felt like independent filmmakers making creative expressions of reality. Especially at that moment they didn't need to be political. They just needed to be well made. They needed an interesting character and an interesting world and somebody behind the camera who understood how to put those things together.

EO

Say more.

LO

I remember thinking: I would kill to do this, to have that kind of exposure and be in conversation with these filmmakers. Garrett Bradley and Joris Debeji and Yance Ford were making incredible work. Elizabeth Lo had made Hotel 22, which I loved. I remember looking around and thinking: “these are my people.”

So I just kept emailing Lindsey and eventually she responded. She'd gone to Harvard too and saw I was an incoming freshman. When I met her I had a folder with ten or twelve ideas in it. She looked at me and said, “wow, you’re really serious about this.” And I was like, “yes, I really want to do it.” Eventually she introduced me to Kathleen Lingo, who became the biggest internal champion of my work at the Times. She helped me find money for projects, and later for my first feature and for Spermworld.

What excited me wasn't journalism exactly. It was that the New York Times, a massive journalistic institution, was interested in creative nonfiction.

EO

Were you ever interested in filmmaking or makers in the artworld? Because when you mention Garrett Bradley and some of those filmmakers I wonder whether there were art influences too or whether you were just breadcrumbing your way toward this thing you were building for yourself. How did encountering those people in this context influence your style?

LO

I just saw people working in remarkably different styles, and the only thing they shared was some basis in reality and some creative expression of it. And I thought that was really cool. I started thinking about Kubrick and Steven Soderbergh and how every movie looked different. Then I started thinking about Kanye and how every album felt completely different from the one before it. I loved that logic. I loved the idea that the style should emerge from the subject and the setting and the world itself. You spend time with somebody, you observe the environment they inhabit, and then you figure out what visual language that world is asking for. That was exciting to me and honestly it still is.

EO

How important was music to that?

LO

Music was huge. I was obsessed with film scores, with the Chinatown soundtrack, with Jonathan Glazer's commercials and music videos, with David Fincher. I was obsessed with Kanye’s Late Registration and with Jon Brion, and with that story about Kanye seeing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and hearing the score and deciding that he wanted to work with that composer because he wanted rap music to feel orchestral and cinematic and enormous. Then My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy comes along and reinvents everything again. Every album was a concept. Every era was a concept. Kubrick felt the same way to me. By the time you get to Dr. Strangelove it feels like he’s no longer imposing style onto the material. He’s asking what the material wants to become. That idea completely consumed me.

EO

When did you get there yourself?

LO

Honestly, probably from the beginning. I knew I wanted to make films and I knew I didn’t have anything interesting to say about my own life. What interested me was finding parts of myself in other people’s stories. I still work with a lot of the same people, and there are probably rhythms and hallmarks that repeat, but I never want there to be one style that belongs to me.

I love Wes Anderson and Roy Andersson and admire them enormously, but I'm less interested in a single recognizable visual identity than in making every project feel distinct from the one before it. Every film should have its own language and rhythm and psychology. It should have an ego and a superego and an id. I want to unearth something in every project that belongs only to that world. And honestly I don't want it to feel like it was made by me. I want it to feel like it was made by a civilization of collaborators. I want it to feel alive in that way.

EO

There were so many moments in those Op-Docs you did that I loved. There was one line where you talked about this elusive color tone in photography and film called middle gray that exists somewhere between black and white. I loved that as a concept. And then in No Jail Time you talked about being interested in non-traditional places and spaces and homes and all these worlds that don’t neatly fit into categories. I actually think non-traditional might be one of the better summaries of your work. Not odd exactly. But I am curious whether you think of yourself that way or think of your interests that way. How would you articulate the kinds of worlds you’re drawn to and why you’re drawn to them and how you make them sing?

LO

I don’t think of what I’m interested in as odd exactly. Or maybe I do. I don’t know. I think I like looking at things that people have already looked at and finding an angle that feels exciting or fresh or somehow newly human. I’m always asking myself: how do you express something that feels incredibly human and recognizable but somehow comes from a different vantage point? Lauren Greenfield once said that one of the best ways to understand the mainstream is to look at the extremes, and I always loved that. When I was younger I was very interested in liminal spaces, and in people living in unusual conditions. I was obsessed with Dark Days and with the possibility that maybe there was an entire body of work to be found in those spaces.

My parents are real estate attorneys and I think I was always interested in systems too. I fell in love with Kiarostami’s work and the way legal systems and bureaucracies become part of his films almost accidentally. I was fascinated that the same structures exist here and shape lives in similarly invisible ways. But honestly I still have trouble identifying the single thing that connects all of the work. I think maybe what interests me is the idea that dreams can become prisons. Everyone has a dream, and anyone can take it too far and end up trapped inside it. I like finding people and worlds where that dream has become almost all-consuming but still feels deeply relatable. If I look at Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, Ren Faire, and now Primetime, I think they probably all share some version of that idea.

EO

Wait, so what happened to the production company?

LO

I have a company called To Be Formed. I produced this documentary recently called The Python Hunt through it and I love that movie. My sister, Mel, is involved, and so is my wife Abbey. I actually met Abbey on Ren Faire, which she produced. Python Hunt was especially fun because I’d wanted to make something about the annual python hunt in Florida since I was a kid. Eventually my friend Xander Robin, who I grew up with in Florida and who’s a really wonderful filmmaker, became interested in it too. We had been trying to write things together that neither of us could quite get our arms around, and eventually I realized this one was perfect for him, and that the best thing I could do was help him get it made.

EO

What I was going to ask is whether you built the company to support your own work too or whether it was always intended to be more informal than that.

LO

I like producing for other people, but more than anything I like protecting a process and a group of people. I basically have two families that I work with over and over again. There’s the Some Kind of Heaven family — David Bolen, Daniel Garber, Christian Vasquez, my sister Mel, Ari Balouzian, my composer. Then there was this second family that emerged through making Ren Faire and Spermworld simultaneously — Max Allman, Nicholas Nazmi, Nate Hurtsellers, Abbey, and Ari again.

At a certain point I realized I already had the producers and editors and cinematographers that I loved working with and what I really wanted was to preserve those relationships as projects got bigger. Even on Primetime, where I couldn't bring the company officially, it was there in spirit. I brought all of those people with me anyway.

EO

How has the changing context changed you though? Because the New York Times is part of Some Kind of Heaven and part of Spermworld and then you move into HBO and larger structures and larger institutions. How have those partnerships changed your process?

LO

With Some Kind of Heaven it was still early and the New York Times didn’t really have a feature documentary apparatus yet. There was Garrett’s film and there was Some Kind of Heaven, some of the first projects to come out of the Op-Docs ecosystem and become features.

I loved working with them. There was a lot of productive tension around questions like: how far is too far? Because there were things narratively and structurally that I wanted to do that stretched the limits of what the Times was comfortable with. By the time Spermworld came around I had worked with Kathleen and everybody there for so long that we largely knew what to expect from each other.

For me, when I’m making a film, I don’t necessarily need context in the traditional journalistic sense. I’m interested in catching up with somebody in the present tense of their life and understanding where they are right now. Depending on the story, what happened ten years ago isn’t always the most interesting thing to me. On that project the Times understandably felt differently, and that tension was productive. Then with Ren Faire I was suddenly working with Elara, the Safdies' company, and I got really close to Ronald Bronstein, who I adore, and David Gauvey Herbert, whose work I loved, and Abbey. And I was working with HBO Documentary Films too. That felt like another moment where I realized I could push even further into this thing I was interested in, which was riffing off reality and using reality as material rather than simply documenting it.

EO

Where did that impulse come from though? This idea of pushing beyond observation and treating reality itself as material?

LO

Actually, the most formative thing for me might go all the way back to LA, around the time we met. I went to LACMA on a day off from work and saw this Larry Sultan exhibition that genuinely changed my life. Even the phrase “ripping off reality” comes from Larry Sultan and Pictures from Home. He was photographing people in documentary contexts but introducing stylized elements into the frame that heightened whatever emotional truth he was after. I loved that idea immediately.

It obviously runs against certain documentary orthodoxies. There are people who believe documentaries simply shouldn't be made that way. But even someone like Frederick Wiseman, who people often hold up as the ultimate observational filmmaker, would reject the idea that his films are objective. He talked about this all the time. He hated the term nonfiction because the “non” felt reductive to him. He would say, “There’s always fiction. I’m arranging scenes. I’m creating associations. I’m building dramatic structure. Even if I didn’t invent the drama, I’m still shaping it and threading it together in a particular way.”

I became obsessed with that continuum. There are so many filmmakers—Kiarostami among them—who have spent entire careers playing in that space between reality and fiction and asking who gets to decide where one ends and the other begins. Is something real because it’s shot a certain way? Is something fake because actors are involved? Is a reenactment somehow less true than observation? Those questions became central to my practice.

What I ultimately want to do is take those heady questions about reality and distortion and representation and hide them inside human drama. I want the experience of watching the work to feel closer to watching reality television than watching theory. I want it to be emotional and entertaining first. Then maybe later you realize there were all these other things happening underneath.

EO

How do you find projects though? Because Ren Faire and Primetime feel very different from each other. How do those worlds enter your life?

LO

Ren Faire came through David Gauvey Herbert, whose work I loved because it reminded me of David Foster Wallace and narrative nonfiction writing. I reached out just to say I loved what he was doing, and eventually he started sending me ideas and asking what I thought. One day he sent me this proposal that I later learned Abbey had actually written, about this guy who had essentially created a real-life kingdom. Immediately it reminded me of Mario from The Happiest Guy in the World. To him it was a kingdom. To somebody else it might look completely different. But I loved the themes and the world, and immediately I wanted to know if it was even real.

They basically said, “We don’t know. We just heard rumors about a succession crisis because this guy was getting older and was still running this hugely profitable business.” I remember thinking: we absolutely have to do this. So we went down there. I shot almost a hundred days over three and a half years, going back every month for two or three weeks at a time. Sometimes we’d shoot and sometimes we wouldn’t. But we had the freedom to make it exactly the way we wanted to make it.

EO

But when you started, did you know what the succession would eventually become? Or did you discover that through making it?

LO

Every documentary starts the same way. You have a pitch or a feeling. Then you shoot something representative of what you think the thing might become: a trailer or a sizzle reel, a proof of concept. When we first arrived nobody wanted to talk to us, and nobody wanted to talk to me in particular.

Abbey had to single-handedly convince everyone that participating was a good idea. Everyone kept talking about this mysterious man behind the curtain who supposedly ran everything but whom nobody had actually seen in years. One person described him as living in the Hobbit version of the Playboy Mansion. And I remember thinking: okay, this sounds incredible. Eventually we met him and he immediately said, “I don’t give a fuck about any of this. I just want to get laid and make art in my garden.” I remember thinking right at that moment - we have something on our hands here that could be really special.

EO

After that moment, what happened next?

LO

We cut together a sizzle reel and Elara gave us the money to go make it. Once we were actually making the film I ended up working really closely with Ronald Bronstein and eventually Josh Safdie toward the end too. Honestly it was a dream experience. We didn’t know where it was going to go or how it was going to end or whether we even had enough material to make the thing we wanted to make. It was stressful and chaotic in all the ways documentaries are, but the experience itself was amazing.

EO

It feels like you’re constantly asking people to trust a vision they can’t fully see yet. Was that true on Ren Faire too?

LO

Honestly it got smoother after that. But every project I’ve ever worked on has had some version of that question hanging over it: Is this a disaster? I have ideas and am hoping to execute them in ways that hopefully feel exciting and different, and it takes time for that to congeal… But once everyone started seeing footage, and cuts that were really brilliantly edited by Max Allman and Nick Nazmi on that project, those concerns disappeared. Primetime was similar in that respect. It was my first scripted feature and suddenly I was working with actors and resources and machinery on a different scale. But we still made it in a way that was similar to the other stuff I’d make - we shot a ton of footage and the edit, that Daniel Garber did, combines all of the things we learned making our documentaries together…. we really found an exciting new language with the film that we hadn’t reached before. Inhabiting reality television - the visual grammar of it.