Robert Pattinson says he hopes Chris Hansen will come to see Lance Oppenheim’s thriller Primetime, inspired by the TV host and his show To Catch a Predator series, as a compliment.
“I would hope in some ways, like the amount of inspiration that his character has given so many people who are involved in this film for years now, I hope it’s some kind of compliment,” he told the press conference for Golden Lion contender ahead of its Venice Film Festival work premiere this evening.
Hansen, who has yet to see the film, has said he has “ethical” issues with the use of his name and the names of his colleagues and family members in a movie that he presumed to be “fiction.” He has also suggested on the basis of the trailer that Pattinson had achieved “a pretty good imitation” of him but that the performance was “overly dramatic”.
“The more you watch the show, there’s something magnetic about his presence… I watched the show when I was younger and I didn’t even think about it and when you obsessively watch it, you realize there’s a strange alchemy with what’s going on, the aesthetics of the show, and how it was directed, and how things are put together, and the time period,” said Pattinson in Venice.
“But something he’s doing is the reason why people are still talking about that show 20 years later, and it’s not to do solely with the subject matter… I just think there was something about the show that was very groundbreaking, kind of breaking the rules of television, and also in some ways like bureaucracy… but then he’s somehow centering it.”
Part of Dateline NBC, To Catch a Predator was a true-crime program which chronicled Hansen’s efforts to out suspected child predators, with the help of law enforcement and a team of decoys pretending to be minors online.
