The following questions and answers are excerpted from a conversation that followed the NBR screening of Primetime.

This is an incredible, confident film. You come from a strong documentary tradition. Why did you choose this to be your first narrative feature?
Lance Oppenheim: Well, it’s funny. I grew up To Catch a Predator, and I discovered it through parodies like South Park and eBaum’s World, that comedy website. So, I discovered the show through these imitations of it, and then the show made such an impression on me when I actually watched it. I must have been around 11 or 12 years old. I saw it on YouTube, and Chris Hansen was a mythological figure. He wasn’t just a normal journalist. He was like Scarface. He was like Tony Montana, with those one-liners. There was something that stuck with me about it—the theatricality of it, the mixture of truth and fiction, the artifice, the actors pretending to be children, the props and the cookies. I saw the show before I saw Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, which is a favorite movie of mine, and in a weird way, they kind of rhyme for me as a filmmaker. I don’t know if I’d be making the types of films that I make, that I’m interested in making, if it wasn’t for this television show.

this part had a very different emotional core and smell to it

Merritt, what drew you to the project?
Merritt Wever: I think—like most actors probably—that once you do a certain kind of part, or you’re offered a certain kind of role for a while, you start itching to do something different. I had come off a string of roles where, while I wasn’t exactly representing goodness, I was using the right part of my heart. I was loving. I was caring. And this part had a very different emotional core and smell to it. When I got involved, the script was still shifting and finding itself, but the shape of the character of Andie never changed. The arc never changed. She’s a woman who was drawn to a very specific kind of material and who works with a very specific kind of man and is given the opportunity to maybe change her life and make a different choice, and she decides not to take that opportunity. We always had that as the container, and then it was a matter of exploring maybe why she didn’t take that chance at a different kind of life—a lighter life, maybe, in my estimation, a better life.

There’s a wealth of archive for Chris Hansen. But for this character, for Andie, there really isn’t that much material. So how did you two build that character together?
MW: It was always clear to me that she was going to be fictional. I like to work based off the page. I know that the best or most important resource for me is always going to be whatever starts to happen between what’s on the paper and like… my chest or something. But I also do a lot of research, and I have to be careful when I’m doing research not to start running off in the wrong direction. I can start following something that isn’t, at the end of the day, what we’re doing, and it’ll live over there, and I’ll get attached. And then when I try to marry the two things, they may not be cohesive. I spoke to two longtime TV news producers who’d been doing it long enough, and in a high-up capacity. Speaking to them about the nature of their jobs, and hearing about the kind of caretaker, babysitter, therapist, handler, manipulator, rag doll, multifaceted role they have to play for the talent was particularly helpful.

Why was it important to bring in this character in such a significant role?
LO: One of the things that was interesting to me in making the movie was wanting to create this institutional portrait of this apparatus. We have Chris Hansen, and we have the internal and external struggle of what he’s going through. We have Decoy Dan, and we have Andie Bender. And Andie’s the one who is running and operating the apparatus. There’s no show without her, and yet she’s given her entire life to the show. What does she receive in return? What is she left with? I like what Merritt was saying. She’s done many, many different characters. The characters that have stuck with me are the ones that are the kindest, and I think of Merritt as a very kind person. And I liked this idea of seeing almost how she would handle the darkness eating away at her. Where’s the humanity? Where does it exist? I thought about this Olivier Assayas movie that I love, Demonlover, and I love every person in that film. And Jem Cohen’s Chain is another one, where you’re seeing the media landscape and this sense of modern life eating away at the people who are doing it. It’s this poisoned, rotten thing that is ripping everything away from everybody—the lightness in them. And with Chris, I was interested in this almost post-traumatic stress that he carries, the way he moves. And I like that Andie is the one who must shoulder and absorb everything, and yet also has to metabolize even the transcript, the words. She knows exactly what Chris is going to do with every single move. And I liked that idea of just observing that. When I watch the movie—and I always say this to Merritt—I’m not watching a performance, I’m just watching a person.

And there were times where I would annoy Merritt by bombarding her with too many references. She works from the page. I’d be like, “Look at this. It’s Mike Wallace’s producer!” and she would be like, “I’m reading the page. I’m reading the page.”

MW: But I watched it. I watched everything.

LO: I was like, “Look at Demonlover. Look at this, the score.” Sometimes the references would become so opaque, she’d be like, “What is this relevant to?” [laughs]. “Watch. Just watch it. It doesn’t matter.”

MW: I think we both worked very hard to understand each other, but sometimes it created a dust storm instead of clarity. But very well-intentioned! I also think that Lance is not the first director to, in a sense, Trojan horse some evil into me. I have a very milk-fed, nice face, and like you said, I’ve played nice girls. And sometimes directors find that container useful. You don’t see the nastiness coming. I did a film with Michel Franco, Memory, where I think I served that kind of purpose as well.

The visual language of the film is so intentional. How did you approach the look of the film with your cinematographer?
LO: David [Bolen], who shot this, did an amazing job. I was his best man at his wedding. I’ve been working with him since I was 17. And he also shot the You Can See Everything film that we did with Nathan Fielder and Elizabeth Holmes. But that was a very different experience.

For this one, we kept talking about how when you turn something as dark as this subject into a form of entertainment, what does that do to you? That was the animating idea that influenced every decision. We went back and looked at Michael Mann’s movies like The Insider and Manhunter, and then we were looking at Natural Born Killers and U Turn and JFK and Demonlover. Vanilla Sky, my favorite film of all time. That was also David’s favorite film of all time. There’s this kind of sense in these movies from the early 2000s. Tony Scott’s movies have it, too, even Michael Bay to some degree, where there’s this concept of the surveillance state and how kinetic and frenetic and scary it can be. I liked the idea of attempting to capture that. I also liked the idea of making a colorful movie, and almost all the colors are sick and rotten. I thought about Happiness, the Todd Solondz movie, which I love so much too. There were a lot of references. You’d come into my office and you’d see, on the set, and I had a wall. I ran out of space with all the images that were there. And sometimes people would not know what they were looking at or how these things would all come together. A Pandora’s box was opened when they created entertainment out of this thing, and I wanted it to feel almost like they’ve unleashed, or they are experiencing, a form of evil. That was the animating idea. When you get so close to something so dark, how does that rub off on you?

Jacob’s Ladder was another one we were thinking a lot about. We also wanted to explore, how can you kind of create an experience where you’re trapped inside, like, a television? And that’s also what I felt like for Chris and for Andie. When you know how dark this gigantic monster is that they’re creating, what does that do to someone like Skyler’s [Gisondo] character, Decoy Dan, who’s like the offering or a sacrifice? You’ve learned in the movie that other people who have filled his shoes didn’t make it very far.