On November 5, 2006, as a camera crew on the hit NBC news show To catch a predator Descending on his home alongside a seven-man SWAT team, Texas District Attorney Bill Conradt shot himself with a Browning .380 pistol. He was communicating online and by phone with someone he thought was a 13-year-old boy, but who was actually an adult working for the vigilante group Perverted Justice. The incident sparked a major lawsuit and led directly to NBC’s decision to permanently pull the plug To catch a predator.
It also serves as the climax of Lance Oppenheim’s film. During prime time, where Robert Pattinson plays the role of To catch a predator host Chris Hansen in such a strange way that a Best Actor Oscar nomination is almost a guarantee.
Pattinson is joined in the film by an unlikely cast of actors, including former NBC executive Jeff Zucker, former child star Jonathan Lipnicki, The office‘s Creed Bratton and indie rock star Phoebe Bridgers, in her first acting role.
For the role of Bill Conradt, Oppenheim selected Alex Winter, best known for his portrayal of Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the Bill and Ted trilogy. Over the past 15 years, Winter has directed a series of acclaimed documentaries, including Downloaded, Deep Web: the untold story of Bitcoin, Trust Machine: the history of blockchainAnd The YouTube effect. Many explore the devastating impact of social media and the Internet as a whole on society, and Prime time takes place in a world on the brink of many of these changes.
We caught up with Winter to talk about his sympathetic portrayal of Conradt, in collaboration with Oppenheim, from his recent Broadway run. Waiting for Godot alongside Keanu Reeves, and the moment he realized that Oppenheim had secretly collaborated with Nathan Fielder on You can see everything over the last three years.
How did you first hear about Prime time?
My agent received a call from Francine Maisler, the casting director, telling me that Lance wanted to talk to me about this role. And I knew Lance quite well from his documentary work. Obviously, he knew my profession as an actor, but we knew each other from the doc space, which is tiny. There are about six people in this space.
So I was a big fan of the script and very interested from the start in the character of Bill Conradt. I was surprised by the depth of the room. It’s a small part, but there’s a lot. And I was very fascinated by Bill Conradt.
What did you find so fascinating about him?
I didn’t know (To catch a predator). It just wasn’t my world. It was broadcast at a time when I wasn’t connected to that kind of television. So I had missed the whole phenomenon. But the script was such an insightful examination of media right at that point of connection before the Internet came along, and I’ve made a lot of films on that very subject. So thematically, the way our culture deals with sexual abuse and predators is of interest to me, and something I’ve touched on with the Children of showbiz doc and I have my own personal story in this space.
And then Lance, whose work I loved, his documentaries have a sort of narrative style. He has a very particular style. That’s why Bill Conradt interested me, it was because of what the movie and Lance were doing with (his story).
I felt like there was an opportunity to represent this taboo cultural creature in a more human way. And not to exonerate him, but simply to present him as a real human being, which is not often the case. So I did a lot of research about Bill, his work environment and his life. I spoke to the DAs and ADAs and others in the area where he practiced. I’m a character actor by trade and training, so I love doing research and digging into backgrounds, and having a real person to investigate was helpful and interesting.
As you learned more, did you begin to sympathize with him?
I mean, I approach these things with sympathy for all parties. Because they’re all people, and they’re people who need help, whether they’re survivors or predators, they both need help. Most of the time, none of them receive any help. So I would say that I approach this subject with empathy and a certain degree of sympathy from the start – certainly with empathy from the start, sympathy as the case may be. I would say I have less sympathy for someone like Harvey Weinstein.
Of course.
But with Conradt, I sympathized. It seemed like a very tragic case that involved coercion and a sort of grotesque throwing at the lions for the sake of the ratings, a desperation for better ratings, and very little nuance and examination of the human beings involved.
So it was, I thought, an interesting opportunity to paint a portrait of someone who certainly had very big flaws, and who functioned in a potentially very harmful way, but who was at the heart of it all, a human being. And that’s something I’ve covered a lot with my materials. So I treated it in the Silk Road case and I’ve dealt with it with other documentaries where they deal with characters who, like most human beings, are neither black nor white.
In the scene where Conradt is on the phone with someone he believes to be a child, it really seems like he’s suffering from his own desires and knows he’s doing something horrible. He is a tortured person.
Yeah. Lance’s documentaries, he calls them “docufantasias”. So there’s a dreamlike, fantastical quality to the world he depicts and to Chris Hansen’s portrayal. Certainly, the way I came to Conradt, I wasn’t trying to be Bill Conradt; it was not a biography of Bill. So there are other things going on in the character that I’m playing that have nothing to do with him that are specifically trying to make a case for his story.
But I have the impression that the character was tormented. This guy suffered from deep loneliness and inner torment. But as you said, it is obviously a constraint, which I wanted to question a little. And again, this is not activism, this is action. So I didn’t do it to plant a flag in the sand or to send a message, but it was rewarding to be able to investigate this person in that way.
I think Lance had a dual interest in me – specifically one, related to how the public perceives me. When you go through the computer and find me on the other end, it could be a real scare, one that we both knew we were looking into. “Oh, shit, it’s that guys? What the hell is this? » You could hear during the screening we saw, there was an audible gasp in the room when I appeared. And that’s exactly what Lance wanted.
But he also knew my own history of abuse, and he knows that I do a lot of things outside of my work with group therapy and helping abused children. So he knew that I had a pretty in-depth understanding of the predator-survivor relationship and what it was.
Lance made so many interesting casting choices in this movie with you, Phoebe Bridgers, Creed Bratton, Jeff Zucker, Jonathan Lipnicki. Few people would have predicted them.
That’s correct. And what I love about Lance is that he’s not meta for the sake of it. He picks on people to get really profound performances out of them. I mean, Creed is amazing in the movie, I think. He’s so good and it’s such a powerful scene. However, this really feels like a scene from Lance’s documents. It’s like a scene from Ren Faire.
So that was helpful to me because Lance was using the same team that he used on all of his documents. He has a very specific creative team. So it was a pretty big film, but it was shot in a nimble way. And because I knew Lance’s materials, I knew how to connect Bill Conradt to that world in terms of creation.
Like the authorities and To catch a predator The production crew approaches Bill’s house, it starts to look like a horror movie. You know something horrible is about to happen.
Yeah. As we were shooting this sequence, I could tell what the mood would be. And obviously, we shot a lot more than what was intended in the film. But I think they used the perfect amount. So what was missing from me, I was actually happy to see disappear. But yeah, his approach was very specific, and the thing about him is he knows what he wants, so it was fun to work that way.
But to your point, it subverts the monster, because in a way the whole sequence is set up as, “Oh, it’s a horror movie and they’re going to have Hannibal Lecter,” like a scene from a horror movie. The silence of the lambs with all the cops descending on this house. But of course the monster ends up being Chris Hansen.
It’s amazing that the movie makes the audience feel bad for a would-be child molester.
Yeah. Honestly, it was important to me, and it’s something I discussed with Lance. I wanted people to sympathize with Bill. Again, that doesn’t mean you exonerate him, but I felt like if I could play a small role in creating a small adjustment in the cultural understanding of these people, especially in the kind of post-Epstein world that we’re in now, where he’s become so caricatured and politicized. At the end of the day, they’re just people and they really need help. And so I really wanted people to empathize with Bill. I mean, I’m not going to lie there.
Bill needed professional help before he hurt a child. He didn’t need an NBC camera crew to break into his house.
Yeah, exactly. He needed help and he probably would have survived if he had it, and everyone would have been better off and it wouldn’t have been like we were unleashing a monster on the world. But we have a long way to go culturally before we get to that point, I think. And some people have told me, some of…
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