Maxance Vincent
Editor Daniel Garber previously collaborated with director Lance Oppenheim on his documentaries Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld. As he makes his fiction debut with Primetime, the editor, who spoke to Awards Radar on Zoom, explains that he was adamant that Oppenheim wanted to incorporate many of the elements he developed in his documentaries for this project
“Lance is somebody who is extremely open-minded and loves to keep discovering things at every stage of the process. He was clear from the beginning that he wanted to carry that attitude into working on a narrative film. Of course, in a documentary, that’s kind of what’s required, at least for making really good documentaries. I feel like you have to be open to discovering whatever there is. You know you can’t script it; you can’t pre-plan everything. You kind of have to see what your subjects are offering up, and then figure out in the edit how to shape that and make it feel intentional and structured in some way. He wanted to approach this with a very similar attitude.
Of course, we had a different starting point, which is that Ajon Singh is a phenomenal writer and wrote a great script on which this is all based. Once he got to set, I think Lance really wanted to dig deeper into that material. He improvised a lot with the actors, grabbing lines and throwing them at them, even lines from earlier drafts of the script. He didn’t limit himself to what was on the page. He wanted to dig deeper and see what else he could unearth. From there, in the editing process, he brought the same sense of improvisation and experimentation to the room. We were always trying to just find ways to dig even deeper and just continue to mine the material for new ways of looking at things.”
A big part of what translates Oppenheim’s shift into fiction filmmaking is how he largely kept most of the same collaborators, who worked in tandem with Garber on the film’s complete vision:
“I think a lot of the look and feel of what Lance works on is due in large part to the relationships that he’s cultivated with his regular collaborators. David Bolen, the director of photography, has shot many of Lance’s films. We’ve worked together on Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld, both of which have very distinctive looks, especially for documentaries. David really likes putting the camera on sticks in a way that isn’t always common for observational films, and it lends a very intentional quality. He is also a magician with light. He likes to light things minimally and stays highly conscious of what’s happening in the story.
What’s so remarkable about his camera work is that he seems to have a great capacity for intuiting what is emotionally happening in a scene, then moving the camera in the exact right way to fit what’s happening on screen. Then there is also Ari Balouzian, the composer, who’s an amazing partner for Lance. He comes onto these processes very early on. He was actually composing music before anything had been shot. Lance, David, and Robert Pattinson would listen to music that Ari had composed for Primetime while they were on set. It sort of set the mood, even in the room during the shoot, and I think that just helped everything feel much more cohesive once it reached my desk.”
Of course, there was so much more to talk about, including blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, the process of editing the different formats in which the film was shot, illustrating the memory that many audience members might have of To Catch a Predator, and how the final scene was shaped.
Listen to the full conversation below:
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