Directing the Performance

What happens when a documentarian makes his first fiction feature about television? You get a film in which every charge the critics file reads, from another angle, like a description of the method. Lance Oppenheim is thirty, formed entirely in nonfiction, the HBO series Ren Faire behind him and an Elizabeth Holmes film co-directed with Nathan Fielder ahead, and Primetime, his first scripted picture, released by A24 from a screenplay by the equally first-time Ajon Singh, takes as its subject Chris Hansen and the Dateline NBC machine of To Catch a Predator. Robert Pattinson plays Hansen. The reviews are split down a line so clean you could light it: everyone admires the surface, and everyone files the same complaint about what is under it. ...

Let me count this one’s debts before its assets, because with Paul Greengrass the two are always drawn from the same account. The debts, filed almost identically by every notice I have read: the middle of The Uprising goes muddled once factions and locations start arriving at speed; several characters function as representations of a class rather than people; and the screenplay keeps reaching past the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt toward folklore, a mythology layer the marketing itself connects to the Robin Hood legend, which sits badly beside the grounded drama around it. Seat42F’s reviewer puts the complaint in one clean sentence, that the film doesn’t need the additional mythology, and Brian Orndorf is blunter still, finding the director dramatically constipated, the pace throttled. The audience wing of the prosecution is on the record too; one r/movies thread opens, with the weariness of a man who paid for his ticket, just watched The Uprising, and honestly, what a slog. ...

I will restrict myself to one question, because it is the question this film lives or dies on: how do you photograph a man the whole world has already memorized, at the age before he was anyone? Anthony Bourdain has been mythologized without pause in the years since his death, and the field of posthumous product is exactly as lurid as you fear. Matt Johnson’s Tony, for A24, written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, answers the question with a scope decision so severe it amounts to a manifesto: one summer, 1975, Provincetown. A nineteen-year-old washes dishes badly, lies about everything, and gets, in the words of Kitchen Confidential that open the film, the good ass-kicking he badly needs. The show, the fame, the voice, none of it appears. The film ends before the man begins. ...

Nicolas Winding Refn was clinically dead for twenty-five minutes in 2023, on a table, mid-surgery, with two weeks’ warning that this might be how it ended. He has said plainly that the idea for Her Private Hell came when he was dead and came back. I begin there not for the drama but because the origin explains the method, and the method is the story. A director who believed his film career was over returned to features after a decade away and spent his second chance on the least commercial materials available: silence, stillness, a fog-bound artificial city, and a horror plot conducted like opera. Whatever you conclude about the result, nothing in it is an accident of laziness. It is all wagered. ...

Commercial cinema is terrified of aimlessness. It demands a rigid three-act structure and a clear protagonist to secure funding. Richard Linklater’s 1990 debut, Slacker, completely rejected this convention, opting instead for a non-linear, “baton-passing” narrative. The Drifting Observer The camera acts as a drifting observer across Austin, Texas. It picks up a conversation, follows it for a few minutes, and then seamlessly hands the narrative off to a new character who happens to cross their path. There is no central plot, only an endless relay race of philosophical ramblings, conspiracy theories, and existential ennui. ...

To capture the unfiltered, destructive reality of New York youth in his 1995 film Kids, photographer-turned-director Larry Clark knew that traditional Hollywood casting would fail. You cannot hire a casting director to find a Juilliard-trained 18-year-old and expect them to convincingly portray the hyper-specific, chaotic reality of a downtown skateboarder. The Participant-Observer Instead, Clark became a participant-observer. He spent three years embedding himself within the downtown NYC skateboarding community, gaining the trust of the teenagers before a camera ever rolled. He learned their language, observed their behavior, and mapped their social dynamics. He approached the narrative film as if it were a strict ethnographic documentary. ...

Traditional film production is an exercise in rigid geography. An actor is told exactly where to stand—their “mark”—so the lighting is perfect and the camera focus is sharp. But hitting a mark destroys spontaneity. To achieve a hyper-realistic, documentary-style intimacy on a tight $700,000 budget, Half Nelson director Ryan Fleck completely rejected the mark. Character-Driven Blocking Instead of forcing actors Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps to adapt to the camera, Fleck forced the camera to adapt to them. He utilized a highly mobile, handheld 16mm camera to follow the actors’ natural instincts. The actors were allowed to move organically through the real Brooklyn locations. This character-driven blocking prioritized emotional spontaneity over technical perfection, resulting in performances that feel radically unscripted and alive. ...

When directing actors, the primary goal is usually to elicit natural, emotional, “human” performances. In Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos does the exact opposite. To construct a horrifying portrait of a family living in an isolated, artificially constructed reality, he systematically strips his actors of natural human behavior. The Trance of the Deadpan Lanthimos directs his actors to deliver their dialogue in a notoriously flat, monotone, and deadpan style. The characters do not inflect; they do not emote. This verbal strangeness forces the characters to appear as if they are in a trance, perfectly reflecting their status as infantilized subjects who have been brainwashed by their parents’ authoritarian social experiment. They are repeating words, not feeling them. ...

True horror does not require monsters or jump scares. True horror is found in obedience. To dramatize the horrifying real-world events of a 2004 fast-food “strip search” hoax, director Craig Zobel understood that Compliance could not rely on traditional cinematic tension. The terror had to come from the unbearable pressure of mundane authority. The Architecture of Obedience Zobel confined the narrative almost entirely to the drab, claustrophobic backroom and office of a fictional fast-food restaurant. He traps both his characters and his audience in this high-stress, inescapable environment. Before the psychological abuse even begins, he establishes the chaotic baseline of a minimum-wage workplace: broken freezers, understaffed shifts, and exhausted employees. ...

When filmmakers attempt to capture the horror of war, they usually default to scale. They show us sweeping, chaotic battlefields and exploding cities. In Tangerines, Zaza Urushadze realizes that scale often dilutes tragedy. To convey the massive, senseless geopolitical disaster of the 1992 War in Abkhazia, he did not build a battlefield. He built a chamber play. The Micro-Scale DMZ The film restricts the conflict almost entirely to the interior of a single, remote farmhouse. By trapping a wounded Georgian soldier and a wounded Chechen mercenary under the roof of an elderly Estonian carpenter, Urushadze turns a domestic space into a high-stakes, micro-scale demilitarized zone. ...